How Perestroika and Glasnost Changed Europe and the World

In 1989 the long, slow decline of the Soviet Union, an empire stretching from the Pacific Ocean across northern Asia to central and eastern Europe, finally came to a head in the form of pro-democracy, pro-market uprisings in several of the union's European republics and satellite states. The Berlin Wall, perhaps the most divisive symbol of the tension between East and West in this part of the empire, came crashing down and with it the pro-Kremlin governments that had set policy for the bulk of the 20^th century in the eastern half of Europe. Within three years the Soviet Union itself was simply gone, replaced by a gaggle of nascent states across the southern and western fringes of the former empire all struggling through various means toward stability and self-realization. As with the broader collapse of the empire, the causes of the 1989 revolutions that helped to precipitate it are quite complex. Each republic or satellite state had its own pre-Soviet history, informing the manner in which it reacted both to several generations of Soviet rule and to the gradual loosening of Moscow's control during the late 1980s-although national identity did play a crucial role in all of the states examined here. Further, there exists notable disagreements both in the broader Soviet context and the narrower European one with which we are concerning ourselves over which factors leading to revolution and collapse should be emphasized over others. Economic funk, the liberalization of media, the rise of Western consumer culture, nationalism, Moscow's increasing marginalization and more all contributed to the disintegration of the USSR's western edge. This paper will attempt to sort through these variables, making connections where appropriate, and determine which ultimately contributed the most to the question at hand without losing sight of the more pronounced academic disagreements on the matter.

It is impossible to disentangle the history of central and eastern Europe during the mid- and late-20^th century from the history of the Soviet Union. Those governments of those countries which were not formally republics of the USSR were nevertheless heavily influenced by Moscow, representing the "Eastern Bloc" which stood as a buffer between the West and the communist "East." During the 1970s and 80s the Soviet Union entered a period of political and economic decline which, while at first difficult to perceive and easily ignored, accelerated through the 80s and in the end proved terminal. After World War II, perhaps as a result of winning that war, Moscow felt that it had "no necessity...to change fundamentally to compete in the post-war international context." The Union's economy was built on energy-intensive heavy industry-made possible by its abundant domestic reserves of metals and oil-and its planners saw no need to change this even as the West diversified into services and other sectors. The oil shocks of the 1970s further exacerbated this dichotomy: skyrocketing prices forced oil-importing nations (the United States and much of western Europe, for one) further away from wasteful industrial policies while simultaneously providing the Soviet Union with added revenue and a false sense of security. Although the country's economic slide had started while prices were still high, oil's sharp drop in the 80s coupled with the drying up of Soviet oil fields put the economy into a recession. Previously lively industrial cities and regions became "rust belts" filled with idling or abandoned factories and increasingly sick inhabitants: infant mortality (due to nonexistent environmental safeguards) and alcoholism (due to a stagnant economy), especially in Russia's outlying oblasts, began to increase during this period. By the mid-1980s, the USSR's military budget was fully 20% of its GDP, four times that of the US, but as costs per unit of output were over 2.5 times that of the US much of this numerical advantage was lost to inefficiency. So it was throughout the Soviet system and, indeed, the Soviet umbrella: economic troubles and worker repression would prove major factors in precipitating revolutions in eastern Europe, especially in Poland.

Crumbling infrastructure and an aging economy fit in nicely with elderly and in some cases senile leaders. The septuagenarian Brezhnev, the Party chief for much of the 70s and early 80s, was only the most visible face in a crowd of decrepit power players. These were men who had come of age during the Stalin era, conservatives who adhered to Party discipline and the strictures of Leninism to the letter: even as it became clear that the country was falling behind the West in a number of economic and social measures they refused to admit that perhaps something was wrong either with the policies of their government or with the basic tenets of their politico-economic system. Indeed, Party higher-ups in Moscow and elsewhere led "privileged, insulated lives...preoccupied with the spoils of office" (and there were many) rather than the betterment of the lives of their subjects. As death claimed these "dinosaurs" one by one, those remaining concluded that the Union's malaise and the widening economic gulf between it and the West was the result of "subjective factors" like the personality (stodgy), appearance (old), and policies (conservative) of its leaders. In 1985, then, Mikhail Gorbachev-an idealistic provincial official who championed a reformist but not-too-radical "socialism with a human face"-was crowned new Party head. It would be Gorbachev who would implement a host of somewhat liberal reforms under the umbrella of "perestroika" in an attempt to reinvigorate the economy, populace and leadership of the Soviet Union-and, in so doing, inadvertently effect its complete collapse.

Gorbachev may have been idealistic, but he was also more realistic than his predecessors: he firmly believed in the superiority of the socialist system, in terms of the public welfare, over capitalism, but he recognized a gap "between socialism's ideals and its disappointing realities within the context of the superpower competition." He had inherited a badly weakened empire: in addition to collapsing oil revenues and serious problems in its industrial sector, the USSR was hopelessly bogged down in an insurgent war in Afghanistan, eating up its military budget and damaging its standing in on the world stage. Although his country was physically still capable of destroying the United States and the rest of the West with its massive nuclear arsenal, it could never hope to win a sustained economic battle nor the more nebulous but equally important cultural one which was already underway. With this in mind he opened negotiations with the Americans on some formerly taboo issues, most notably nuclear disarmament, while simultaneously implementing perestroika.

Gorbachev knew that for all his government's state media control and import restrictions, the "de facto" culture of Soviet youth had been Western culture: a thriving black market ensured that Western pop music and clothing items like blue jeans (jeans with Western rather than Russian labels were a status symbol in the USSR) found their way across the "Iron Curtain." A large portion of the empire's populace had become liberalized as its leaders doggedly clung to the status quo. Gorbachev's first move was to break with this legacy of leadership: he replaced 14 of 23 department heads in the Secretariat, 23 of 78 secretaries in the empire's constituent republics and 39 of 101 Soviet ministers, clearing away resistance to perestroika. Economically, with an eye to the West, he concerned himself with three areas of improvement: the need to "increase scientific and technical progress" to increase production, the need to foster "close links between the immediate producer and the means of production" so that labor might have a real stake in production (one of Marx's tenets, after all), and the development of the stagnant science of economic planning. In practice, this meant restructuring the bureaucracy overseeing the economy to move "away from command and control to motivation and incentives" in the hopes of reducing waste and "concentrating investment in the machine building sector," the traditional powerhouse of the Soviet economy. He employed uplifting rhetoric as he traveled the country promoting perestroika, talking about the "human factor" and "socialism with a human face," raising popular expectations that this policy would represent a radical break with the past and a radical improvement in living standards.

Gorbachev and his inner circle also aimed to "shake up the effete establishment" of Party leadership with a media liberalization policy they called glasnost. The government's longstanding jamming of Western radio programs like the BBC, Deutsche Welle and Voice of America was ended, and in a March 1987 interview on Russian television Margaret Thatcher openly criticized her host government. With glasnost the Soviet people became privy to a broad spectrum of historical facts-the horrors of the Stalin years in particular-and current events-Chernobyl, for example-which had previously been repressed. By 1988, some satellite states' and republics' governments were sanctioning the aboveground publication of opposition newspapers as the circulation of traditional state media fell. As glasnost accelerated, however, perestroika remained mired: state industries found it difficult to adjust to in-house accounting and planning and widespread opposition remained through 1987 to allowing market forces determine price increases. Moscow and especially its republics began to deal with criticism more unevenly-for every repressive action like the massacre of Georgian demonstrators in April 1989 there was an unmolested public protest-and by 1989 just one in eight Russians supported perestroika. Discontent was even higher in the outlying states, where continuing economic decline and rising nationalism push Moscow to the margins and dictate the (revolutionary) course of events. The Soviet central government had remained isolated from criticism for so long that, once exposed to it, it found that much of what it had taken for granted about the popular sentiment of the people of its republics was false or outmoded. Indeed, a "absence of clear orders from Moscow"-i.e., an inability to concoct a coherent policy in response-may be what ultimately allowed the socialist governments of eastern and central Europe to be swept away.

With regards to the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Gorbachev and his team were woefully out of touch. The USSR had occupied this country near the outset of WWII under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which was widely regarded in the West and more importantly in the Baltics as illegal: the annexation had entailed the suppression of each country's dominant language and culture, not to mention the imposition of foreign rule. Once glasnost broke, protesters began to denounce the pact. In Estonia dissidents demanded the restoration of Estonian as the dominant language, a larger number of Estonians in positions of power, the creation of a market economy and full independence-in effect, to be released from the Soviet orbit. And these sentiments rapidly trickled upward: the Lithuanian Communist Party apparatus went dormant in 1988 as party members began speaking publicly of their nation taking on an "international worldview" in the name of "national pride."