9.7 The Fall of Communism

Under Leonid Brezhnev (1964–1982), the Soviet economy stagnated. Central planning produced steel and weapons but not the consumer goods, technology and food people wanted, and the bloc fell further behind the West in computers and living standards. The war in Afghanistan (1979–1989) drained money and lives, and the arms race consumed a huge share of the economy. Falling world oil prices in the mid-1980s cut the Soviet Union's main source of foreign currency.

Opposition grew in the satellites. The Helsinki Accords (1975) had committed communist governments to human rights, and dissidents used that promise against them. In Czechoslovakia, the playwright Václav Havel and others signed Charter 77, demanding that the government respect those rights.

In August 1980, strikes at the Gdańsk shipyard, led by electrician Lech Wałęsa, forced the government to allow Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc. Within a year it had about ten million members and became a national movement for reform. The election of a Polish pope, John Paul II, in 1978 and his visit home in 1979 had strengthened Poles' confidence and the Catholic Church's role as a rival source of authority. In December 1981 General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law, banned Solidarity and arrested its leaders, but the movement survived underground.

Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader in 1985, determined to revive the system, not end it. His main policies were these:

• Perestroika (restructuring): limited market reforms, such as allowing some private businesses and cooperatives and giving factory managers more control. The half-reforms disrupted the planned economy without creating a working market, and shortages got worse.
• Glasnost (openness): more freedom of speech and press. Soviet citizens could now openly criticize the government and learn about past crimes such as Stalin's purges. The government's attempt to hide the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) at first showed why openness was needed.
• Democratization: contested elections for a new Soviet parliament in 1989.
• Foreign policy: arms control agreements with the United States, such as the INF Treaty (1987), and withdrawal from Afghanistan (completed 1989).
• Ending the Brezhnev Doctrine: Gorbachev told Eastern European leaders that the Soviet Union would no longer use force to keep them in power (9.4). Without the threat of Soviet tanks, communist governments had to face their own people.

Germany reunified on October 3, 1990, when East Germany joined the Federal Republic, after negotiations involving the two German states and the four wartime Allies. Chancellor Helmut Kohl pushed it through quickly, and the united Germany stayed in NATO.

Inside the Soviet Union, glasnost released nationalism. The Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia demanded independence. In August 1991 communist hardliners tried a coup against Gorbachev; it collapsed in three days when crowds in Moscow, rallied by Russian president Boris Yeltsin, resisted. Republic after republic then declared independence, and the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991. Czechoslovakia split peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia on January 1, 1993, while Yugoslavia broke apart in war (9.5). Most former bloc countries later joined NATO and the European Union (9.10). They also switched to market economies, in Poland's case through rapid “shock therapy” starting in 1990, which brought growth for some and unemployment for others. In some former Soviet republics, independence brought instability and war, as in Chechnya (9.5), the fight between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, and Moldova's breakaway Transnistria region.