7 - The collapse: a revolutionary symphony in four movements, 1989

Summary

Erosion finally reached its conclusion in the miraculous year of 1989. State socialism, which mastered a third of the entire world, spectacularly collapsed in six countries of Central and Eastern Europe. In two more years the remaining European state socialist regimes followed, including their birthplace and international fortress, the Soviet Union.

The ‘Annus Mirabilis’ occurred two hundred years after the French Revolution, which destroyed European feudal regimes. The latter was symbolized by the collapse of the walls of the Bastille, which expressed the end of an oppressive feudal regime. The symbol of 1989 was the fall of the Berlin Wall, an emblem of a closed, oppressive, isolationist state socialist era and the division of Europe.

The revolutionary transformation, however, did not follow the classic scenario of the French Revolution. It began as a ‘negotiated revolution’ in Poland when the two confronting parties had sat at a round table and, both having made compromises, agreed on a peaceful metamorphosis. It began as a reform from above in Hungary without any violent conflict when the old regime relinquished its remaining power to a new one. The revolutionary symphony of ‘Annus Mirabilis’ began with two slow, but historically tense and powerful movements.

The first movement: the rise of an organized mass opposition, solidarity, confrontation, and collapse – Poland

The Polish workers continued their permanent struggle for a tolerable material existence. Reformist intellectuals became deeply disappointed after the promise and hope of the Polish October in 1956 and the rise and fall of Gomulka's ‘Polish road.’ Although an accidental spark was always enough to cause some explosion, the repeated heroic revolts and bloodshed did not lead anywhere. The seventies, however, brought a turning point.