Change in the Socialist bloc

For Poland’s Communist government, the crisis of 1981 represented a dangerous challenge. Poland was among the countries where society, under the auspices of the Catholic church, had showed the strongest resistance to Party influence. The crisis came in 1980 when the Polish government reacted to a recession by announcing drastic austerity measures. That summer saw numerous strikes, especially in the shipyards of Gdansk, where an electrical fitter by the name of Lech Walesa became a mouthpiece for the protest. The country's leaders were soon obliged to sign an agreement with the strikers at the Gdansk shipyard: for the first time in a Warsaw Pact country, this agreement officially recognized the existence of a union independent of the Party, the Solidarity union (Solidarnocs), thus calling into question the hegemony of the Communists.

From then on, the free Solidarity Union stood against the Communist Party under General Jaruzelski. On December 13, 1981, General Jaruzelski declared martial law, marking the start of a campaign of arrests of opposition figures and leading to a ban on the free union. Although this saved Poland from Soviet intervention similar to that experienced by Czechoslovakia in 1968, it also demonstrated that Eastern European leaders once more viewed loyalty to Moscow as a political necessity.

Perestroika: Gorbachev opens up new perspectives

Behind a facade of invincible (military) strength, however, the Soviet economy in particular was showing major weaknesses, rendering far-reaching reform inevitable. In the face of widespread inefficiency and falling standards of living, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had been secretary-general of the Soviet Communist Party since 1985, decided to galvanize society and restructure the country to put it back on track for growth.

He coined two key terms which stood in total contrast to the existing system: Perestroika ("restructuring") of the economy and politics and Glasnost ("openness"). Among other things, Glasnost meant that information should no longer be withheld from the Soviet people or the rest of the world. Reporting on the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power station (April 26, 1986) showed initial but hesitant application of this information policy: on Soviet television, while the image of a half-destroyed building was already being shown, the voiceover stated that there had been neither serious damage nor major fires.

Since Gorbachev's main priority was domestic reform, and since he saw the arms race as a threat to the continued existence of the USSR, he put an end to the Soviet politics of expansionism. Gorbachev communicated a new picture of the Soviet Union, a Soviet Union which would one day maintain peaceful relations with the entire world, as well as overcoming both nuclear and ecological threats. Concrete political measures such as Moscow's announcement of its withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1986 soon convinced even the sceptics. At international level, this brought rapid change. In the West, Gorbachev exerted a fascination which soon peaked in so-called "Gorby-mania" – even Ronald Reagan was persuaded to support Perestroika. Under the banner of a “Common European House”, Gorbachev’s politics facilitated a new kind of international relations in Europe. During these years, where stockpiling arms was the order of the day, Gorbachev sought to strengthen political, economic and cultural cooperation on the Old Continent. The most radical repercussions of this change of position came with the peaceful revolutions of 1989.

In Eastern Europe, initial reactions to Gorbachev’s new policies and to the public admissions of the USSR’s weakness were mixed. The Polish and Hungarian heads of state, for example, saw in Gorbachev a chance to obtain a certain degree of autonomy for their countries. The governments in East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Rumania, on the other hand, feared that the reforms would undermine their own regimes. Many people in central and eastern Europe became supporters of Gorbachev's ideas, knowing full well that pressure from Moscow was the only force capable of pushing their governments towards liberal reforms.