Revolutions of 1989: Eastern Europe's Annus Mirabilis
Six communist governments in eastern Europe fell within four months in 1989, and only one of them fought. The precondition was Soviet. Gorbachev told the eastern leaderships from 1985 that troops would not be sent to keep them in power, and his spokesman gave the policy a name by joking about the Sinatra doctrine — each country doing it their way. Poland went first and slowest: round table talks in the spring, and partly free elections in June that Solidarity won so completely that the communists could not form a government, producing the bloc's first non-communist prime minister in August. Hungary opened its border with Austria in May, and thousands of East German holidaymakers walked through it. The demonstrations in Leipzig grew from a few hundred at Monday prayers to 300,000 by October, with no shooting, and the Berlin Wall opened on 9 November after a spokesman misread a note at a press conference. Czechoslovakia's velvet revolution followed within a week: a beaten student demonstration on 17 November, a general strike, and Havel president by the end of December. Bulgaria's leader of thirty-five years was removed by his own politburo. Romania was the exception, with Ceaușescu shot on Christmas Day after several hundred deaths. Germany reunified in 1990, and the Soviet Union itself dissolved in December 1991. The whole thing was faster than anyone including the participants expected, and Havel's line about it — that history had accelerated — is the standard summary. The one common element across all six is that the security forces were not ordered to fire, or were ordered and declined. Everything else — the negotiated transitions in Poland and Hungary, the street pressure in Germany and Czechoslovakia, the palace coup in Bulgaria — differed completely.
- Year: 1989 CE
- Category: Political
