The disintegration of the Soviet Union had an immediate
impact on its neighbors to the west. First to respond,
as in 1956, was Poland, where popular protests of high
food prices had erupted in the early 1980s, leading to the
rise of an independent labor movement called Solidarity.
Led by Lech Walesa (b. 1943), Solidarity rapidly became
an influential force for change and a threat to the government’s
monopoly of power. The union was outlawed
in 1981, but martial law did not solve Poland’s serious
economic problems, and in 1988, the Communist government
bowed to the inevitable and permitted free national
elections to take place, resulting in the election of
Walesa as president of Poland in December 1990. Unlike
the situation in 1956, when Khrushchev had intervened
to prevent the collapse of the Soviet satellite system in
Eastern Europe, in the late 1980s, Moscow—inspired by
Gorbachev’s policy of encouraging “new thinking” to improve
relations with the Western powers—took no action
to reverse the verdict in Warsaw.
In Hungary, as in Poland, the process of transition had
begun many years previously. After crushing the Hungarian
revolution of 1956, the Communist government of
János Kádár had tried to assuage popular opinion by enacting
a series of far-reaching economic reforms (labeled
“communism with a capitalist face-lift”), but as the 1980s
progressed, the economy sagged, and in 1989, the regime
permitted the formation of opposition political parties,
leading eventually to the formation of a non-Communist
coalition government in elections held in March 1990.
The transition in Czechoslovakia was more abrupt.
After Soviet troops crushed the Prague Spring in 1968,
hard-line Communists under Gustav Husak followed
a policy of massive repression to maintain their power.
In 1977, dissident intellectuals formed an organization
called Charter 77 as a vehicle for protest against violations
of human rights. Regardless of the repressive atmosphere,
dissident activities continued to grow during the
1980s, and when massive demonstrations broke out in
several major cities in 1989, President Husak’s government,
lacking any real popular support, collapsed. At the
end of December, he was replaced by Václav Havel, a dissident
playwright who had been a leading figure in Charter
77.
But the most dramatic events took place in East Germany,
where a persistent economic slump and the ongoing
oppressiveness of the regime of Erich Honecker led
to a flight of refugees and mass demonstrations against
the regime in the summer and fall of 1989. Capitulating
to popular pressure, the Communist government opened
its entire border with the West. The Berlin Wall, the most
tangible symbol of the Cold War, became the site of
a massive celebration, and most of it was dismantled by
joyful Germans from both sides of the border. In March
1990, free elections led to the formation of a non-
Communist government that rapidly carried out a program
of political and economic reunification with West
Germany.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union and its satellite
system in Eastern Europe brought a dramatic end to the
Cold War. At the dawn of the 1990s, a generation of
global rivalry between two ideological systems had come
to a close, and world leaders turned their attention to the
construction of what U.S. President George Herbert
Walker Bush called the New World Order. But what sort
of new order would it be?
World History
