In what way did the political changes in Soviet Union influence the events in Eastern Europe during the closing decades of the 20th century?

Answer:

The revolutions that swept Eastern Europe in 1989 were made possible above all by change in Moscow. Gorbachev's reforms and his abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine removed the Soviet guarantee on which the communist regimes had ultimately depended.

The Soviet guarantee before Gorbachev

• Soviet troops had crushed the East German rising of 1953 and Hungary in 1956.
• The Prague Spring was suppressed by Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968.
• The Brezhnev Doctrine asserted the right to intervene to preserve socialism.
• Martial law in Poland in 1981 was imposed under the shadow of that threat.

Gorbachev's changes

• Perestroika and glasnost from 1985 legitimised reform and criticism.
• He explicitly renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine, jokingly called the Sinatra Doctrine.
• He told the United Nations in 1988 that states must choose their own path.
• He withdrew from Afghanistan and sought to reduce the burden of empire.
• He pressed reluctant east European leaders to reform.

The revolutions of 1989

• Poland's Solidarity won semi-free elections in June 1989 and formed a government.
• Hungary opened its border with Austria, breaching the Iron Curtain.
• The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and Germany reunified in 1990.
• Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution brought Havel to power.
• Ceausescu's regime in Romania fell violently in December 1989.
• In no case did Soviet forces intervene.

The wider consequences

• The Warsaw Pact and Comecon were dissolved in 1991.
• The Soviet Union itself broke up in December 1991.
• Eastern European states turned towards NATO and the European Union.
• Yugoslavia's dissolution took a violent course, unlike the rest.

Why the regimes collapsed so quickly

• They had never possessed genuine popular legitimacy.
• Economic stagnation and indebtedness discredited them further.
• Solidarity in Poland and the churches elsewhere supplied organised opposition.
• Once Soviet force was withdrawn, they had no remaining basis of authority.

Political change in the Soviet Union was therefore the decisive enabling condition for the transformation of Eastern Europe. As historians of 1989 emphasise, the communist regimes had long rested on the certainty of Soviet intervention, and once Gorbachev withdrew that certainty they proved unable to survive their own populations.