the Eastern European nations that uphold ‘social-
ist internationalism’. That sounded like a softer
version of the Brezhnev Doctrine, not a repudia-
tion of it. The regimes went on believing that the
communist state was safe and would, if the need
again arose, be defended by the Red Army, as it
had been in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in
1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. It dawned on
them only slowly, if ever, that Gorbachev was
ready to abandon them if that was the will of the
people.
By the time of the Twenty-Seventh Party
Congress in February and March 1986 Gorbachev
had moved on and was urging much more
radical political reform in the Soviet Union. By
September, he was telling the people of Krasnodar
that the ‘essence of perestroika... is for people to
feel they are the country’s master’. In 1987 and
1988 he reshaped Soviet foreign policy, deter-
mined to win the support, trust and economic
help of the West. His new foreign minister,
Eduard Shevardnadze, gave him his enthusiastic
backing and put forward to the Central Commit-
tee of the Soviet Communist Party in February
1990 an important reason for this revolution in
the Soviet Union’s policies: ‘It is only through
extensive international co-operation that we will
be able to solve our most acute domestic prob-
lems.’ Soviet-led repression in Eastern Europe
would irreparably harm the more important new
Soviet interests. Like other imperial powers, the
Soviet Union had reached the point where the
burdens of empire, and its negative effects on
Soviet relations with the rest of the world, far out-
weighed the advantages. In the missile age, terri-
torial buffers no longer provided protection; the
‘military imperative’ of the immediate post-war
years had vanished too.
The prop that had held up national commu-
nist regimes in Eastern Europe – the popular
belief that their communist leaders were at least
better than a Soviet occupation and direct Soviet
rule – had been knocked away. In 1989, the pos-
sibility of Soviet intervention was no longer
feared. And without the Red Army behind them,
the national people’s armies of conscripts could
no longer be relied on to support the regimes
against their own people.
One by one the reasons for the revolutions
that swept through Eastern Europe in 1989
became clear. The nucleus of a dissident leader-
ship was somewhat uncertainly in place in
Hungary, Romania and East Germany; there was
a more entrenched one in Czechoslovakia, where
the Charter 77 group had a long history of
protest; and Solidarity in Poland was already a
power in its own right. Crucial also was the dis-
illusionment of the masses with the economic sit-
uation and with the whole decaying system. The
leadership elite knew that it could no longer save
itself simply by changing the man at the top. The
revolt began with the young. The feeling, soon
all pervading, that the Iron Curtain was full of
holes, that it could no longer separate the angry
people from the centres of power in East Berlin,
Prague, Budapest or Sofia, any more than it could
prevent people in the East from contacting the
West, was intoxicating. On 9 November 1989,
the Berlin Wall, that potent Iron Curtain barrier,
fell before an onslaught of the people. It was as
symbolic an event as the fall of the Bastille.The final rot had begun ten years earlier in the
Lenin Shipyard in Gdan ́ sk. The Solidarity move-
ment had spread until it had gained the support
of half of Poland’s adult population. With the
Gdan ́ sk agreement concluded between the
Solidarity leaders and the government in 1980,
the stranglehold of the Polish Communist Party
appeared to be broken. The support for Solidarity
had a variety of roots; repeated economic failures
during thirty-five years of communist rule,
working-class and intellectual resistance to a
single-party authoritarian state, nationalism and
Catholic rejection of atheistic communism – these
together provided a fertile soil for the growth of
a broad opposition. Solidarity was a party in all
but name, and, in the year during which it was
allowed to function as a free trade union move-
ment, recruited 10 million members. The morale
of the Communist Party collapsed as communists
also switched to Solidarity.
As the economy slumped further, General
Jaruzelski became the new party leader and
declared martial law on 13 December 1981.
Fearing Soviet intervention, the conscript Polish890 GLOBAL CHANGE: FROM THE 20th TO THE 21st CENTURY