Revolutions of 1989: Eastern Europe's Annus Mirabilis
In 1989, in a cascade of largely non-violent revolutions that no one had predicted and that occurred within weeks of each other, communist governments across Eastern Europe collapsed. Poland held free elections in June, with Solidarity winning every contested seat; Hungary began dismantling its border fence with Austria in May, opening the Iron Curtain; East Germans demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands demanding freedom; Czechoslovakia's 'Velvet Revolution' ousted its communist government in ten days; Romania's communist dictator Ceaușescu was overthrown and executed. By December, every Warsaw Pact government except Albania had changed hands. The revolutions of 1989 were made possible by Gorbachev's explicit repudiation of the Brezhnev Doctrine — his signal that Moscow would not send tanks to save communist governments as it had in 1956 and 1968. When Hungarian reformers asked Soviet Ambassador Aleksander Yakovlev whether Moscow would intervene if they dismantled the Iron Curtain, the answer was no. The revolutions were not Western-organised: they were home-grown expressions of accumulated frustration, energised by the Helsinki human rights framework, the example of Solidarity, and the knowledge that the Soviet guarantee had been withdrawn. They were, in the historian Timothy Garton Ash's phrase, 'refolutions' — partly revolutions, partly negotiations, producing regime change through a combination of popular pressure and elite bargaining.
- Year: 1989 CE
- Category: Political
