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Eastern Europe Walks Out: 1989 and the Empire's Point of No Return
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
By 1989, the Soviet empire was haemorrhaging — and the fall of the Berlin Wall proved Moscow could no longer hold its outer ring. This episode traces the chain of crises, from Brezhnev's stagnation to Chernobyl to the Baltic Chain, that made the Soviet collapse not just possible but inevitable.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On the twenty-third of August, nineteen eighty-nine, two million people stood in a line stretching across six hundred kilometers of Baltic coastline. They were Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians.
To understand the Baltic Chain, you have to go back roughly two decades. To Leonid Brezhnev and a choice that would define everything that followed.
Then there was Afghanistan. The Soviet intervention began in December nineteen seventy-nine and was supposed to be quick.
On the twenty-sixth of April, nineteen eighty-six, reactor number four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. The first instinct of Soviet officialdom was entirely predictable.
Gorbachev arrived as general secretary understanding that the system needed to change. He was right about the diagnosis.
This is where the nationalities question comes back in, and it comes back hard. The Soviet Union was theoretically a federation of republics with the right of self-determination.
The Baltic Way happened on the twenty-third of August, nineteen eighty-nine. The date was chosen deliberately.
The Baltic Chain didn't happen in isolation. Across nineteen eighty-nine, the Soviet empire's western edge was in motion.
The hardliners in Moscow had been watching all of this with alarm. By August nineteen ninety-one, a group of senior officials, including the head of the KGB, the defense minister, and the vice president, decided they'd seen enough.
The Baltic Chain matters not just as a historical image but as a proof of concept. Two million people, with no weapons and no army behind them, demonstrated that the Soviet system's claim over its own population had expired.
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