The revolutions of 1989, including the fall of the Berlin Wall (9 November 1989), the round-table negotiations in Poland and Hungary, and the collapse of communist regimes across Eastern Europe

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to explain how communist regimes across Eastern Europe collapsed in a chain reaction during 1989, beginning with Polish elections in June and ending with Romanian revolution in December, made possible by Gorbachev's refusal to intervene.

The answer

The structural background

The Eastern European communist regimes had been in long economic and ideological decline. The "social contract" of low expectations in exchange for full employment and basic welfare was breaking down. Polish foreign debt reached $40 billion by 1989. Hungarian living standards had fallen 20 per cent during the 1980s. Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and East Germany maintained better material standards but at the cost of accumulating debt and visible technological lag.

The cohort of communist leaders who had taken power in the late 1940s and 1950s (Honecker, Zhivkov, Husak, Ceausescu) had aged in place. New generations of party members and intellectuals (Mazowiecki, Pozsgay, Havel, Modrow) preferred negotiated transition to repression. Civil society had grown through 1976 (Polish KOR), 1977 (Charter 77), the Catholic Church under John Paul II, and the unofficial peace and ecological movements of the 1980s.

Poland: round table to government

Solidarity (Solidarnosc) had been founded at the Gdansk shipyards in August 1980 by Lech Walesa and had reached 10 million members before being banned under martial law (13 December 1981). Through the 1980s it remained an underground mass movement.

Faced with the August 1988 strike wave, Interior Minister Czeslaw Kiszczak proposed round-table talks. The talks ran from 6 February to 5 April 1989. Outcome: Solidarity re-legalised, partially free elections, a new bicameral parliament. The Sejm (lower house) would have 65 per cent of seats reserved for the communist coalition; the new Senate would be fully free.

Election (4 and 18 June 1989): Solidarity won 99 of 100 Senate seats (the hundredth was independent) and all 161 contested Sejm seats. The reserved seats included 33 places for senior communists who needed 50 per cent of votes to be elected; 33 of them lost. The communist parliamentary group's coalition partners (United Peasants and Democrats) defected.

Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the first non-communist Prime Minister in the bloc since the late 1940s on 24 August 1989. The communist party dissolved itself in January 1990.

Hungary: opening the door

The Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party began reform under reformers Imre Pozsgay and Miklos Nemeth from 1988. Janos Kadar was eased aside in May 1988. Reformers reburied 1956 Prime Minister Imre Nagy on 16 June 1989, an act of public reconciliation that delegitimised the post-1956 order.

The Pan-European Picnic at Sopron (19 August 1989) opened a section of the Austrian border for three hours, allowing about 600 East Germans to escape. On 10 September 1989 Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Horn formally opened the border to East German citizens, defying the bilateral travel treaty with East Germany. Through October about 50,000 East Germans crossed.

Hungary's reformed party split in October. Multi-party elections were agreed; the 1989 constitutional amendments turned Hungary into a parliamentary republic. Free elections followed in March to April 1990.

East Germany: from Leipzig to the Wall

East German emigration accelerated through October 1989: 24,000 left through Czechoslovakia in early October, 14,000 by the end of October. Monday demonstrations in Leipzig grew from a few hundred in early September to 70,000 on 9 October, the "October 9" night that did not become Tiananmen.

Erich Honecker was forced out on 18 October and replaced by Egon Krenz. Krenz's regime announced a new travel law on 9 November. Politburo member Gunter Schabowski, who had not been fully briefed, told a press conference at 6.53 pm that the law took effect "immediately." West German television led with the line; East Berliners massed at Bornholmer Strasse and other checkpoints. At about 10.45 pm Colonel Harald Jager opened the gate at Bornholmer Strasse.

The Wall fell. Helmut Kohl's 28 November Ten-Point Plan opened the path to German unification. Hans Modrow's transitional government, the 18 March 1990 free elections, and the Two Plus Four Treaty (12 September 1990) led to unification on 3 October 1990.

Czechoslovakia: the Velvet Revolution

A student demonstration in Prague on 17 November 1989 marking the 50th anniversary of the Nazi closure of the universities was beaten by riot police on Narodni Trida. The rumour of a student's death (false but politically decisive) brought 200,000 to Wenceslas Square on 19 November and over 500,000 on 25 and 26 November. The Civic Forum was founded on 19 November under Vaclav Havel.

A general strike on 27 November confirmed the regime's isolation. Communist leadership negotiated. Government of National Understanding (10 December 1989) included non-communist majority. Alexander Dubcek (the 1968 leader) was elected Federal Assembly chairman on 28 December; Vaclav Havel was elected president on 29 December 1989.

Bulgaria and Romania

Bulgaria: Todor Zhivkov, in power since 1954, was deposed by a Politburo coup on 10 November 1989, the day after the Wall fell. The reformed party (renamed Bulgarian Socialist Party) won the June 1990 elections.

Romania was the violent exception. Nicolae Ceausescu's police state had no reform faction. Protests in Timisoara from 16 December 1989 over the eviction of the Hungarian pastor Laszlo Tokes turned into uprising. The Securitate killed about 100 in Timisoara. Ceausescu's rally on 21 December in Bucharest was hijacked by booing crowds; he fled by helicopter on 22 December. He and Elena Ceausescu were captured, tried by military tribunal, and executed on Christmas Day 1989. The total death toll of the Romanian revolution was about 1,100.

Significance

By the end of 1989 every Warsaw Pact regime except Albania (which had left in 1968) had fallen or was in transition. The Cold War in Europe was over in a way no one had imagined at the start of the year. The Soviet bloc's hollowness was exposed; the chain reaction had been accelerated by the open border in Hungary, the East German collapse, and the demonstration effect.

The peaceful character of the revolutions (Romania excepted) was historically unprecedented. The "1989" model, round-table negotiation, free elections, multi-party democracy, market reform, became a template, applied with mixed results in the 1990s.

Timeline

Historiography

Timothy Garton Ash's The Magic Lantern (1990) is the contemporary participant account. Padraic Kenney's A Carnival of Revolution (2002) emphasises civil society. Stephen Kotkin's Uncivil Society (2009) downplays civil society and stresses regime hollowness. Mary Sarotte's The Collapse (2014) is the standard account of the Wall's fall as accident.

Common exam traps

Treating 1989 as foreordained. None of the regimes was expected to fall. The cascade was contingent on Gorbachev's permission, Polish and Hungarian initiative, and the East German collapse.

Forgetting the Wall fell by accident. Schabowski's confused press conference, not a planned opening.

Missing the Romanian exception. Romania's revolution was the only violent one and the only one where the leadership refused to negotiate.

In one sentence

The 1989 revolutions dismantled the Soviet bloc through a chain reaction: Poland's round-table elections (June), Hungary's opening of the Austrian border (10 September), East Germany's collapse from October and the Wall's accidental fall on 9 November, Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution (17 to 29 November), Bulgaria's coup (10 November), and Romania's violent revolution (16 to 25 December), all made possible by Gorbachev's Sinatra Doctrine (October 1989) abandoning the Brezhnev Doctrine of armed intervention.