FRONT PAGE

LOCAL NEWS:
   GSA
   FITZWATER HONORS
   BAT BOY

   TERROR TEACH IN
      PICTURES
  
FEATURES:
  PANIC
  GREAT DEPRESSION

 NATIONAL:
  911 TRIAL
  RELATED

INTERNATIONAL:
   IRAN
   RELATED

BLOGS:
  SEAN'S BLOG
  TOM'S BLOG

HISTORY:
   NHL
   COMMUNISM

POETRY MONTH

PROFS
   AS PEOPLE

READERS' RIDES

CALENDAR

PODCASTS

INTERACTIVE
   NARRATIVES

ARCHIVES

CONTACT US
 

by Nicholas White
Exchange History Writer

     For Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, despite its being the dominant force of the area for over half a century, when the end came, it came relatively rapidly.  The beginning of the end was in 1986, when the relatively new soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, announced reforms to be made in the Soviet Union and its satellite nations. 

    The reforms were known as perestroika and glasnost, the former dealing with economic reforms, and the latter social ones.  Gorbachev was forced to do this because the once powerful soviet economy was flagging.  Throughout the Cold War, the American battle plan had been one of “starve the enemy into surrender”.  America, by developing (or overdeveloping rather) its military industrial complex, built bigger and better bombs, guns and other weaponry.  In doing so, they forced the soviets to keep up to protect themselves.  The theory was that the soviets would run out of money first, and therefore collapse.  By the mid 1980’s it was working, and Gorbachev, installed in 1985, had to do something about it.  Unfortunately, the measures he took to preserve the Soviet Union were ultimately the ones that destroyed it.

     Gorbachev’s reforms succeeded in turning things around some for the soviets, but they also forced the soviets to loosen social controls, and in an attempt to get the western nations to trade with them more, stop doing things like crushing protesters with military force.  Gorbachev began pressuring the satellite states to follow the example of the greater whole, and go through with reforms.  Some places however, sick and tired of soviet domination, took the reforms a little bit further.  In 1989, Poland held elections and threw out most of the communist party members in its government.  It was followed almost immediately a similar revolution in Hungary.  The Soviet Union had abandoned the policy of interfering in satellite nation’s affairs as part of its reforms, (the Brezhnev Doctrine) which is the reason these two events were not met with massive amounts of tanks and soldiers.

     Germany, whose government was so hard-line that they viewed the new soviet attitudes as subversive, resisted the new attitudes, even after a visit from Gorbachev himself.  However, growing social unrest forced them to cave in, and open the gates in the Berlin wall.  From there, the states bean to topple one after another, domino style.  Czechoslovakia held a “velvet revolution” with students marching on police, carrying flowers.  Bulgaria and other nations followed one by one.  Interestingly, these revolutions were amazingly bloodless.  The only exception was Romania.  After ordering tanks to crush a brewing revolution, the dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu, was treated to the sight of his tanks turning around and accompanying the mob back to his residence.  He fled in a helicopter, but was captured, and his (short) trial and (fast) execution were videotaped and broadcast.

     The Soviet Union itself was, after all this, not long for the world.  The soviet republics closest to the nations of Eastern Europe began to grow in their unhappiness, and due to the glasnost, the military was not used as a peacekeeping force anymore.  There was an attempted coup to remove Gorbachev, even though it ultimately failed, it showed the lack of confidence the people had in the government.  The final blow came when the Ukraine, the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, voted for independence.  The long feared Soviet Union had fallen not to any outside force, but to the forces within.