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The Domino the Soviets Couldn't Stop: 1989 and the End of Empire
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
By late 1989, every Warsaw Pact country had broken free — and not a single Soviet tank moved to stop them. Episode 11 traces why Gorbachev surrendered the empire's edge, and why saving Eastern Europe would have meant losing the Soviet Union itself.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
By the end of nineteen eighty-nine, every Warsaw Pact country in Eastern Europe had broken free of Soviet domination. Not one Soviet tank rolled to stop them.
To understand nineteen eighty-nine, you need to understand what the Soviet relationship with Eastern Europe actually was. After World War Two, Moscow installed compliant governments across Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, and Bulgaria.
By the mid-nineteen eighties, Gorbachev had concluded that the Soviet Union couldn't afford its empire. Economically, it was bleeding resources it didn't have.
Poland moved first, and it moved through the ballot box. Solidarity, the independent trade union movement, had been suppressed in the early nineteen eighties under martial law.
Hungary had been quietly reforming its economy throughout the nineteen eighties, experimenting with market mechanisms in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. By nineteen eighty-nine, the Hungarian Communist Party had concluded that full political reform was necessary for survival.
By October nineteen eighty-nine, mass demonstrations were breaking out in East German cities. Leipzig, Dresden, East Berlin.
The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia followed within weeks. Massive street demonstrations, a government that had lost its nerve and its Moscow guarantee, a rapid transfer of power.
Gorbachev's retreat from the Brezhnev doctrine was a rational response to an impossible situation. But it had consequences that extended far beyond Eastern Europe.
On the twenty-third of August, nineteen eighty-nine, the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, something happened that was unlike anything the Soviet Union had faced before. Approximately two million people, spanning Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, formed a human chain.
The fundamental problem the Soviet leadership faced in nineteen eighty-nine and into nineteen ninety wasn't simply that Eastern Europe was leaving, or that the Baltics were restless. It was that the tools they had to respond were either unavailable or counterproductive.
Gorbachev's calculation had been that losing Eastern Europe would save the Soviet Union. Let the empire's edges go, stabilize the core.
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