After 1949, the Cold War division of Europe into two rival blocs seemed to have become a permanent fact of life. Once both the US and the USSR had acquired intercontinental ballistic missiles in the 1950s, neither side could hope to attack the other militarily without suffering massive retaliation. The Soviet occupations of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 taught two lessons: Moscow would not allow any threats to Communism in its satellite countries, and the West would not provide any real assistance to protest movements on the other side of the ‘Iron Curtain.’
Despite the military ‘balance of terror’ between the two sides in the Cold War, pressures for change in the Communist world began to build up in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1950s, Soviet scientific and technological successes had made it seem as if the two systems were both creating wealthier societies. By the 1970s, however, the capitalist world had moved decisively ahead of the Communist bloc. Computer technology was just one area in which the West had made big strides that the Communist countries could not match. To try to modernize their economies and ward off unrest from their populations, the Communist countries took advantage of the relaxing of tensions during this period of détente to increase trade with the West and to borrow heavily to modernize their industries. They thus became more involved in the world economy and less able to ignore the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, despite the crushing of the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968, protest movements developed in other parts of the Communist bloc. In the Soviet Union itself, dissident spokesmen like Andrei Sakharov, a famous physicist, spoke out for civil rights. Members of the Soviet Union’s Jewish minority attracted worldwide support for their demand to be allowed to emigrate freely. In Poland, a trade-union protest movement called Solidarity emerged in 1980. The spectacle of workers turning against a government supposedly devoted to their interests exposed the contradictions in the Communist system. The Solidarity movement was suppressed by Polish Communist authorities in 1981, but less brutally than the Hungarian or Czech movements: Soviet and Polish Communist leaders were now fearful of losing their economic connections to the Western world.
The death of the longtime Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in 1982 soon led to dramatic changes in the Communist world. In 1985, a much younger man named Mikhail Gorbachev became the new Soviet leader. He realized that the backward Soviet economy could no longer meet the western challenge, including the rapid military buildup that conservative American president Ronald Reagan had launched after his election in 1980. Gorbachev announced a policy of reform (“perestroika”), which meant dismantling some of the centralized Soviet economy. To encourage support for reform, he also encouraged an atmosphere of openness or glasnost, allowing for honest discussion of the history of the Soviet regime. Gorbachev had hoped that these policies would make the Communist regime more popular; instead, they encouraged massive expressions of discontent throughout the Communist world.
The Communist bloc collapsed with unexpected speed in 1989. With Gorbachev indicating that the Soviet Union would no longer use force to support the regimes in other Communist countries, protest movements toppled one Soviet satellite state after another. A revived Solidarity movement forced the Polish government to hold free elections and allow a peaceful transfer of power to non-Communist groups. Similar processes followed in the other Soviet-bloc countries. Western public opinion reacted most strongly to the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, which has become the symbol of the end of the Cold War. Less than a year later, West and East Germany were united. The new post-Communist countries moved quickly to convert their socialist economies to a capitalist model.
In the Soviet Union itself, change was even more radical. Non-Russian minorities demanded independence, while traditional Communists blamed Gorbachev for letting the country fall apart. In 1991, Gorbachev was nearly overthrown in a coup attempt; he was saved only by the intervention of a popular Moscow politician, Boris Yeltsin, who soon became more powerful than Gorbachev himself. In December 1991, Yeltsin became president of Russia. A new constitution ended the Soviet regime, and the Soviet Union’s former republics became independent countries. The erratic and unpredictable Yeltsin presided over the complete disintegration of the former Soviet economy. Living standards for most people plunged while crime soared and a few successful business barons grabbed control of formerly state-owned enterprises. Yeltsin was finally succeeded by the more efficient and more authoritarian Vladimir Putin, but the future of the new Russia is still very much in doubt.
The other former Communist countries have also found the transition to western-style democracy and capitalist market economies harder than expected. One former Communist state, Yugoslavia, was torn apart by internal conflicts that led to bloody fighting from 1991 to 1999, the first major armed conflict in Europe since 1945. Elsewhere, frustrated populations have sometimes even turned to former Communist politicians in hopes of gaining better economic conditions. So far, however, the democratic reforms made in 1989 have lasted. Many of these countries are counting on integration into the European Union and NATO to bring them economic growth and political stability.
The collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 clearly marked the end of the post-World-War-II era. It also showed that European history is still capable of taking surprising turns that profoundly affect the rest of the world. The enlarged European Union that is now taking shape will have a bigger population and economy than the United States, and may profoundly alter the balance of power and wealth in the twenty-first century.