10.5 The collapse of the outer defenses of the empire

Of all the remarkable things that happened in Eastern Europe after 1985, none was more surprising than the decision of Gorbachev and his advisors to allow the collapse of the Eastern European satellites. Eastern Europe did not just slowly slip out of Soviet hands: Gorbachev signaled time and again that the Soviet Union would not interfere. The dissidents, in particular in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, were courageous people, who by their behavior greatly contributed to the loss of legitimacy of these regimes, but they could not have successfully resisted tanks. In any case, their movement was not new; what was new was the announced unwillingness of the Soviet tanks to move.

Gorbachev believed in the possibility of reforming communism in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. He did not appreciate how little legitimacy these regimes possessed, and therefore overestimated their independent strength. The problem that the Soviet leaders faced in 1989, as they had in the past, going back to 1945, was the absence of a middle road. These regimes were installed primarily because of the justified assumption of the Stalinist leadership that the Eastern European countries left to themselves, most clearly – Hungary, Poland, and Romania – would end up with anticommunist regimes. The only way to prevent such a development was to deprive people of the right to self-determination. The fundamental problem never changed.

During the period of perestroika, Gorbachev supported those leaders who advocated change, and for a while in East Germany, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia, he became a symbol of reform. He used his decisive influence to get rid of the leader of the Bulgarian Party, Todor Zhivkov. Gorbachev, appearing in Berlin in 1989 to great public acclaim, said, “Life punishes those who delay,” thereby undermining the position of Erich Honecker, the hardliner chief of the party, which quickly led to his removal. This was a paradoxical situation that could not long last: the head of an occupying power came to stand for liberty. The Soviet leader took a major step toward the disintegration of the German Democratic Republic by letting it be known that the Soviet Union had no objection to the Hungarians opening the border to East German citizens. The communist regime ultimately collapsed because the security forces did not carry out orders to shoot, because they knew that Soviet forces were instructed not to interfere under any circumstances. The symbolic end of the cold war came when East Berliners tore down the wall that separated East and West.

The change in Poland and Hungary was quasilegal: the ruling parties in effect allowed themselves to be voted out of office, and thereby perhaps prepared the soil for their reappearance at a different time, under different circumstances and under a different name. In Czechoslovakia and East Germany the old style leadership did not so easily give way and therefore had to be removed by bloodless revolutions. Only the most odious dictatorship of all, in Romania, had to be overthrown by force.

Although Gorbachev at the outset did not foresee the full consequences of his actions, there was a moment when it became obvious that the process had gone further than he had wished. At that point the choice was to retain Soviet dominance by the use of brutal force or allow the disintegration of the empire. Gorbachev once again made the morally correct decision. His thinking may also have been influenced by the fact that maintaining the empire was expensive, and the Soviet Union could not any longer bear the cost of being a superpower. The Soviet leader wished to give primary attention to the economic, political, social, and even cultural regeneration of his own country. At least for the time being, domestic policy considerations had to outweigh the claims of foreign policy. Ending the cold war seemed like a necessary price to pay for Western credits and access to technology – that is, for joining the modern economic community.

Most likely the Soviet Party chief’s thinking went beyond the calculations of economic costs and gains. He genuinely wanted his country to rejoin the Western world, “our common European home,” as he liked to put it. The great paradox of the October revolution was that the Bolsheviks, who were anxious to Westernize the country and had little respect for Russian culture, in fact set their country on a path that cut it off from the Western world. Gorbachev was a westernizer, who understood that being part of the European community meant more than economic reforms; it also meant the acceptance of European standards of behavior. European civilization has always been pluralist, and the price of joining was acceptance of this pluralism.

The consequences of allowing the communist regimes to be overthrown were profound. Gorbachev’s strategy was risky because it was likely to alienate a significant component of the power structure, the generals and admirals. They could not be expected to approve the loss of what must have seemed to them the Eastern European shield. In fact, the withdrawal from Eastern Europe put the Red Army at a great military disadvantage, and within a short time reduced the Soviet Union to the role of passive bystander.

Nor could the conservatives within the party leadership support such a strategy. The retreat contributed to the delegitimization of the Soviet regime itself. The loathing of the Eastern Europeans for their regimes showed that time was not on the side of communism, that there was in fact no inevitable march toward a glorious communist future, as had always been assumed. Marxists had always derived great power from their belief that the future was predictable, that history was going in their direction. Shevardnadze in his remarkably frank speech to the twenty-eighth party congress admitted that the communist regimes in Eastern Europe could be saved only by the use of force. He went on to draw an explicit parallel between the dissatisfaction of Soviet conservatives about retreat from Europe and attacks by McCarthy and his followers on the U.S. government for the loss of China.

Indeed, infection came from Eastern Europe. Now that Gorbachev’s government had given the Eastern Europeans the right to self-determination, how could they deny it to the peoples of the Soviet Union? Why should the Hungarians be allowed to have a system of their own choice, but not the Lithuanians – or the Russians, for that matter?

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