Revolutions of 1989

• 1. Introduction

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  The Revolutions of 1989 began with a single trade union. On the 14th of August 1980, workers at a shipyard in Gdansk walked off the job, setting in motion a chain of events that would, within a decade, bring down the political order that had governed half a continent since the end of World War II. That union was Solidarity, and at its peak it counted 10 million members, making it the first and only independent labor organisation in the entire Eastern Bloc. What followed those 1980 strikes was nine years of repression, underground organizing, and then, suddenly, revolution. By the end of 1989, communist governments had fallen in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. The Berlin Wall was gone. The Cold War, the defining geopolitical contest of the 20th century, was effectively over. How did the most fortified political system in modern history collapse so fast? And why did it happen when it did? The answers lie in the economics of Soviet decline, the choices of one reformist Soviet leader, and the courage of ordinary people who decided, in city after city, that they would no longer be afraid.

• 2. Gorbachev and the Cracking System

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  Mikhail Gorbachev came to power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, and from the beginning he represented something genuinely new. A younger generation of Soviet apparatchiks around him had watched the stagnation of the Brezhnev era accumulate for decades. The Soviet Union's military costs, its KGB apparatus, and its subsidies to foreign client states had pushed its economy toward serious decline. It needed Western technology and credits to remain competitive, and the existing command structure could not provide them. In 1986, Gorbachev launched glasnost, a policy of openness, alongside perestroika, a program of economic restructuring. By the spring of 1989, the Soviet Union had held its first multi-candidate elections for a newly established Congress of People's Deputies. The Chernobyl disaster in April 1986 accelerated these reforms by demonstrating the cost of Soviet opacity. Gorbachev later said the Soviet Union spent 18 billion roubles on containment and decontamination, a sum that virtually bankrupted the state. Meanwhile, in November 1988, the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic issued a declaration of sovereignty, the first of what would become a cascade of such declarations across the Soviet world. Hardline leaders in East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania refused to read the signals. "When your neighbor puts up new wallpaper, it doesn't mean you have to too," declared one East German Politburo member. That dismissiveness would cost them power within months.

• 3. Poland Leads the Way

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  Nationwide strikes struck Poland in April and May of 1988. A second wave began on the 15th of August, when workers at the July Manifesto coal mine in Jastrzębie-Zdrój struck to demand the re-legalisation of Solidarity, and within days sixteen other mines joined them, followed by shipyards including the Gdansk Shipyard on the 22nd of August. On the 31st of August 1988, Lech Wałęsa was invited to Warsaw by the communist authorities, who had finally agreed to talk. Formal Round Table discussions opened on the 6th of February 1989 in the Hall of Columns in Warsaw. The agreement signed on the 4th of April 1989 legalised Solidarity and set up partly free parliamentary elections for the 4th of June, the day after the massacre of Chinese protesters in Tiananmen Square. The election results were a political earthquake. Solidarity captured every seat it was permitted to contest in the Sejm. In the Senate, it won 99 out of 100 available seats, with the remaining seat going to an independent candidate. Many prominent communist candidates failed to reach even the minimum vote required for their reserved seats. On the 24th of August 1989, Poland's Parliament made Tadeusz Mazowiecki the country's first non-communist Prime Minister since the early postwar years. He received 378 votes in a tense chamber, with 4 against and 41 abstentions. On the 7th of July 1989, Gorbachev had already told members of the Council of Europe that interference in the sovereign affairs of other states was "inadmissible," effectively renouncing the Brezhnev Doctrine. This became known informally as the Sinatra Doctrine, a joking reference to the Frank Sinatra song "My Way." Poland had just shown every other Eastern Bloc country what that doctrine meant in practice.

• 4. The Picnic That Opened the Wall

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  On the 2nd of May 1989, Hungary began dismantling its 240-kilometre border fence with Austria. It was a political gesture more than a physical opening, but its consequences proved enormous. The idea of going further came from Otto von Habsburg, who proposed it to Hungarian Prime Minister Miklós Németh. What followed was the Pan-European Picnic of August 1989, advertised through posters and flyers distributed among East German holidaymakers camping in Hungary. The Austrian branch of the Paneuropean Union, headed by Karl von Habsburg, distributed thousands of brochures inviting East Germans to a picnic near the border at Sopron. Thousands crossed into Austria. East German leader Erich Honecker, in a memo dictated to the Daily Mirror on the 19th of August 1989, complained that Habsburg had distributed leaflets as far as Poland and that East Germans were given gifts, food, and Deutsche Marks before being persuaded to move west. By the end of September 1989, more than 30,000 East Germans had escaped to the West before the GDR closed travel to Hungary. Thousands more camped in the muddy gardens of West German embassies in Prague and Budapest, waiting for reform. The Monday demonstrations in Leipzig began drawing 1,200 to 1,500 protesters in September, then 8,000, then 10,000. Honecker issued a shoot-and-kill order. Rumors spread that a Tiananmen-style massacre was planned for the 9th of October demonstration. Instead, 70,000 citizens took to the streets of Leipzig that Monday. The authorities on the ground refused to fire. The following Monday, 120,000 people marched. By the 23rd of October, Leipzig's protesters numbered 300,000. Honecker was deposed on the 18th of October and replaced by Egon Krenz. On the 4th of November, half a million citizens converged on the Alexanderplatz in Berlin for the largest demonstration the GDR ever witnessed. Five days later, a confused announcement by regime spokesman Günter Schabowski that border changes were in effect "immediately, without delay" sent hundreds of thousands to the checkpoints. The guards, overwhelmed and receiving no orders to stop them, opened the gates.

• 5. Velvet and Blood

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  On the 17th of November 1989, riot police in Prague suppressed a peaceful student demonstration. That night became the spark for Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution. By the 20th of November, the number of peaceful protesters in Prague had grown from 200,000 the previous day to an estimated half-million. Five days later, 800,000 people gathered at Letná Square. On the 27th of November, a two-hour general strike involving all citizens of Czechoslovakia succeeded without incident. The Communist Party announced on the 28th of November that it would relinquish power. On the 29th of December 1989, Václav Havel was elected President of Czechoslovakia. Romania followed a different path entirely. Nicolae Ceaușescu had been re-elected as leader of the Romanian Communist Party in November 1989, signalling his intention to outlast the upheaval sweeping the continent. On the 16th of December, his secret police, the Securitate, moved to arrest a local Hungarian Calvinist minister named László Tőkés in Timișoara for sermons that offended the regime. Serious rioting erupted. When Ceaușescu ordered a mass rally in his support outside Communist Party headquarters in Bucharest on the 21st of December, the crowd booed him as he spoke. On the morning of the 22nd of December, the Romanian military changed sides after the announcement that defense minister Vasile Milea had died, reportedly by suicide. Rank-and-file soldiers, believing Milea had been murdered, went over virtually en masse to the revolution. Ceaușescu and his wife Elena fled by helicopter from the roof of the Central Committee building. On Christmas Day, Romanian television broadcast footage of the couple facing a hasty trial and being executed by firing squad. The Romanian Revolution killed over 1,000 people. One hundred of the dead were children. The youngest victim was one month old.

• 6. Beyond Europe

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  Mongolia's democratic revolution began on the morning of the 10th of December 1989, in front of the Youth Cultural Center in the capital Ulaanbaatar. There, Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj announced the creation of the Mongolian Democratic Union, the first pro-democracy movement in Mongolia's history. Protesters called for their country to adopt perestroika and glasnost. In late December 1989, demonstrations grew after news spread of an interview with Garry Kasparov published in Playboy, in which the chess champion suggested the Soviet Union could improve its economic health by selling Mongolia to China. The nationalist dimension of the protests was captured in a symbolic detail: demonstrators used traditional Mongolian script, which most Mongolians could not read, as a repudiation of the system that had imposed the Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet. On the 4th of March 1990, a joint outdoor meeting drew over 100,000 people demanding democratic change; the government sent no representative. Five days later, on the 9th of March, the chairman of the Politburo of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party dissolved the Politburo and resigned. Mongolia's first free multi-party elections took place on the 29th of July 1990. In China, by contrast, the Tiananmen Square protests of April to June 1989 ended when tanks rolled into the square on the 4th of June. The exact number of casualties was never established. But the images from Tiananmen reached television screens across Central and Eastern Europe and helped galvanize the spirit of liberation there, even as political change in China itself stalled. Political reforms varied across the globe, but by the time the wave had passed, communist parties had lost their monopoly on power in all but five countries: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam.

• 7. The Soviet Endgame

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  Lithuania declared full independence on the 11th of March 1990, becoming the first Soviet republic to do so. The Soviet government sent troops to the streets of Vilnius in January 1991, and 14 people died in confrontations the Lithuanians called the "January Events." Latvia saw its own confrontation, known as "The Barricades." Both countries, along with Estonia, contended that their absorption into the Soviet Union had been illegal under international law and that they were reasserting an independence that still legally existed. The Soviet government recognized Baltic independence on the 6th of September 1991, days after a failed coup by hard-liners, led by Vice President Gennady Yanayev, had attempted to overthrow Gorbachev in August 1991. Boris Yeltsin, then president of the Russian SFSR, rallied the people and much of the army against the coup, and it collapsed. Gorbachev's authority never recovered. On the 1st of December 1991, voters in Ukraine overwhelmingly voted to secede from the Soviet Union in a referendum. On the 8th of December, Yeltsin met with his counterparts from Ukraine and Belarus and signed the Belavezha Accords, declaring that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. Gorbachev resigned as Soviet president on the 25th of December. The next day, the Supreme Soviet ratified the Belavezha Accords, legally dissolving the Soviet Union. The Cold War is considered by some to have formally ended on the 3rd of December 1989 at the Malta Summit between Gorbachev and U.S. President George H. W. Bush, held just weeks after the Berlin Wall fell. Many historians, however, place the true end on the 26th of December 1991, the day the Soviet Union's own legislature voted itself out of existence. The Warsaw Pact, the military alliance that had underpinned Soviet dominance for decades, had already dissolved on the 1st of July 1991 at a meeting in Prague.