Abstract
Stalinism had tried to atomize society, to force each individual to face the state alone. In the same way, Stalin had separated the states of Eastern Europe, discouraging intraregional cooperation and forcing the Soviet policy line upon each country. Though much had changed in the meantime, the understanding that Soviet policy was to serve as a model for Eastern Europe and the backup threat of Soviet intervention remained in force well into the 1980s. As the Romanian joke went, the Moscow phone number for fraternal assistance was 56–68–80. In 1987 Gorbachev had acknowledged the value of free political choice for individuals, if only to facilitate economic reform. It was at first unclear whether this endorsement of pluralism extended to international socialist relations. The Soviet model now called for political reform, but the Soviets were also saying that their example was no longer obligatory for other socialists. As he traveled around Eastern Europe, Gorbachev was at pains to describe Soviet reform plans and the new political reform line, but also not to impose it. Still, the Soviets continued to speak of the superior interests of socialism and refused to take the steps, such as explicitly renouncing the Brezhnev Doctrine, that would have helped convince the world that they had really given up their claims to hegemony.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
On “Deutschmark Diplomacy and Its Limits,” see Josef Joffe, “The View from Bonn,” in William E. Griffith, ed., Central and Eastern Europe: The Opening Curtain? (Boulder: Westview, 1989), 154–159,
and Hanns-Dieter Jacobsen, “The Foreign Trade and Payments of the GDR in a Changing World Economy,” in Ian Jeffries and Manfred Melzer, The East German Economy (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 235–260. On prisoner buyouts, see Craig R. Whitney, “East Germans Tell How Bonn Paid for Prisoners,” New York Times, 1 August 1990: 33,000 between 1964 and 1989, with prices rising from the equivalent of $10,000 to $60,000 per head. On Hungary’s debt crisis and entry into the IMF in 1982 (without Western objection but also without Western sacrifice of principle, if it is accepted that Hungary was already relatively very liberal),
see Paul Marer, “Hungary’s Balance of Payments Crisis and Response, 1978–1984,” in East European Economies: Slow Growth in the 1980s, Vol. 3: Country Studies on Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia, Selected Papers Submitted to the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1986), 298–321.
Rakowski’s memo is cited and used extensively in Timothy Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity (New York: Random House, 1989), 264ff. The background was the degenerating social and political atmosphere in Poland during these years.
Something of the flavor of the lived experience can be tasted in Michael T. Kaufman, Mad Dreams, Saving Graces: Poland—a Nation in Conspiracy (New York: Random House, 1989).
See Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern (New York: Random House, 1990), 16–17 and 42, and, on the impact of the strikes of April-May 1988 and the beginning and course of the round-table talks,
David Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics. Opposition and Reform in Poland Since 1968 (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1990), 182ff.
This leapfrogging effect is clearest in the fine account of 1989 developments in the two countries in Ronald D. Asmus, J.F. Brown, Keith Crane, Soviet Foreign Policy and the Revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 1991), “Poland and Hungary,” 32–84.
The basic accounts are Georges Schöpflin, Rudolf Tökés and Ivan Völgyes, “Leadership Change and Crisis in Hungary,” Problems of Communism, 37, no. 5 (September–October 1988) (through May 1988, based on insider evidence) and László Bruszt and David Stark, “Remaking the Political Field in Hungary: From the Politics of Confrontation to the Politics of Competition,” in Ivo Banac, ed., Eastern Europe in Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 13–55 (from mid-1988 through late 1989). For a vivid evocation of the mood leading to the crisis, written in 1985, see Garton Ash, Uses of Adversity, 143–156. On how Kádár’s “hybrid society” (and economy) degenerated into crisis,
see Elemér Hankiss, “In Search of a Paradigm,” Daedalus, 116, no. 1 (Winter 1990), 183–214.
Hope for a reformed socialist paradigm was very hardy: see Ivan Szélényi, “Eastern Europe in an Epoch of Transition: Toward a Socialist Mixed Economy,” in Victor Nee and David Stark, eds., Remaking the Economic Institutions of Socialism: China and Eastern Europe (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1989), 208–232. On one culmination of the crisis, see Garton Ash, “Budapest: The Last Funeral,” in his Magic Lantern, 47–60.
“Police Attack Protesters at Prague Demonstration,” New York Times, 29 October 1988. For figures on the extent of the post-1969 purges, see Peter Hruby, Fools and Heroes. The Changing Role of Communist Intellectuals in Czechoslovakia (Oxford: Pergamon, 1980), 146–149.
On the evolution of GDR trade, visits, and contacts in the 1980s, see David Childs, “The SED Faces the Challenges of Ostpolitik and glasnost,” in David Childs, Thomas A. Baylis, and Marilyn Rueschmeyer, eds., East Germany in Comparative Perspective (London: Routledge, 1989), 3–10.
For this phase of the Ceauşescu regime, which turned out to be the last, see J.F. Brown, “Conservatism and Nationalism in the Balkans,” in Griffith, ed., Central and Eastern Europe, 293–300, Daniel N. Nelson, Romanian Politics in the Ceauşescu Era (New York: Gordon and Beach, 1988),
and Trond Gilberg, Nationalism and Communism in Romania. The Rise and Fall of Ceauşescu’s Personal Dictatorship (Boulder: Westview, 1990).
Charles Gati, The Bloc that Failed (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), gives a useful country-by-country summary in almost reverse order. See also J.F. Brown’s remarks on what he calls the “laissez-faire,” or Mark II, period in the Gorbachev leadership’s approach to Eastern Europe, from 1989, in Surge to Freedom, 60–70.
See Bernard Gwertzman and Michael T. Kaufman, eds., The Collapse of Communism (New York: Times Books, 1990), 25–30, 33–36. See also Jan T. Gross’s analytic retrospective, “Poland: From Civil Society to Political Nation,” in Ivo Banac, ed., Eastern Europe in Revolution, 56–71. Brown gives an extremely useful chronology of 1989 events in the area as a whole, with added sections on Yugoslavia and Albania, in Surge to Freedom, 271–302.
Beyond the works cited in notes 5 and 16 above, there is accessible material on these events in Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern, 25–46 (“Warsaw: The First Election”), and Maya Latynski, “Poland,” in Larry Garber and Eric Bjornlund, eds., The New Democratic Frontier. A Country-hy-Country Report on Elections in Central and Eastern Europe (Washington, D.C.: The National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, 1992), 98–104.
The shape and content of this Hungarian dilemma are identified by Jon Elster, “Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe: An Introduction,” The University of Chicago Law Review, 58, no. 2 (Spring 1991), 454–455, and later in the same issue by Wiktor Osiatyński, “Revolutions in Eastern Europe,” 838–839.
On the antecedents of the East German revolution, see Vladimir Tismaneanu, “Nascent Civil Society in the German Democratic Republic,” Problems of Communism, 38, nos. 2 and 3 (March–June 1989), 90–111, and on emigration as political dissent, Norman M. Naimark, “Ich will hier raus’: Emigration and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic,” in Ivo Banac, ed., Eastern Europe in Revolution, 72–95.
There is a convenient record of the revolution itself in Elizabeth Pond, After the Wall. American Policy toward Germany (New York: Priority Press Publications, 1990), 7–19, and an exciting insider’s account is evidently in press: G. Jonathan Greenwald, Berlin Witness: An American Diplomat’s Chronicle of East Germany’s Revolution (Penn State Press, forthcoming).
For chilling commentary on the process by one of its Slovak victims, see Milan Šimečka, The Restoration of Order. The Normalization of Czechoslovakia 1969–1976 (London: Verso, 1984).
Copyright information
© 1993 Thomas W. Simons, Jr.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Simons, T.W. (1993). The Road to 1989. In: Eastern Europe in the Postwar World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10884-5_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10884-5_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-0-312-09678-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-10884-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)