After the Fall: Thousands of Germans gather to celebrate the demise of Communism with the symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall on November 10, 1989
Europeans on both sides of the Iron Curtain began the decade of the '80s feeling sorry for themselves. Suffering from oil-price shock, stagflation and political inertia, East and West alike were hoping for signs of an upturn. Worried about the demise of detente that followed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, they desperately sought assurances that the nations of NATO and the Warsaw Pact could find ways to coexist without blundering into war. A small dose of bolstering would have sufficed to cheer up Europe. What it got instead was a rebirth, a historic, epoch-ending transformation that almost exhausted the supply of superlatives in every language of the Continent.
The end of the cold war came as a surprise. One reason was that the West was accustomed to viewing the U.S.S.R. almost exclusively through a military prism. Weaponry was overwhelmingly the subject of East-West discussions, and officials on both sides tended to believe the relationship was healthy if they were making progress on arms control. By that criterion, which in the end contributed only a footnote to history, things were not going well in 1980. Even though Presidents Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev had sealed the SALT II agreement with a kiss in Vienna, it was dead a few months later, the victim of the invasion of Afghanistan and a suspicious U.S. Senate. Just as worrisome, the Soviets were going ahead with deployment of a new generation of big, three-headed missiles, the SS-20s, targeted on Western Europe.
To the West, it looked like a significant strategic shift, and NATO adopted what became known as the "two-track decision." The alliance would offer not to deploy any additional missiles if the Warsaw Pact would eliminate the SS-20s, but in the meantime NATO would proceed with its own modernization: 572 new intermediate-range nuclear missiles.
All across Europe, hundreds of thousands of communists, peace activists, church leaders, students and nervous citizens poured into urban avenues and parks to protest NATOS's (not the Soviets') missile deployment. And while most of the world was watching the peace-loving throngs, something new was happening in Poland. It did not seem new at first because the Poles were forever going on strike. But this time the workers at the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk formed a union that would actually represent the workers' interests against the state's. When the Polish government offered to negotiate, it gave de facto recognition to the right to strike. The result was the creation of Solidarity, the first labor organization inside the Soviet bloc to challenge head-on the communists' claim to represent the proletariat.
As Solidarity grew and threatened the stability of the Polish regime, Moscow faced a dilemma: Would it use its troops as it had in Hungary and Czechoslovakia? We know from recently opened archives that the Soviets were prepared to intervene, but only as a last resort. They much preferred to let the Polish communists handle the crisis themselves, knowing that an invading Soviet army would face opposition from the entire nation and might not even be able to end the strikes. Brezhnev & Co. decided against using force and settled for installing General Wojciech Jaruzelski and martial law. The decision would echo in Eastern Europe.
Soon thereafter, Moscow underwent a series of leadership changes that saw the dying out of the hard-line, undereducated Marxist-Leninist generation. Brezhnev, who had been ailing for years (and who had sometimes embarrassed his country by eating state dinners with a spoon), died in November 1982. His successor, Yuri Andropov, died in February 1984, and Andropov's successor, Konstantin Chernenko, expired a year after that.
Then came the man everyone had been waiting for: Mikhail Gorbachev, 54, an intelligent, energetic, apparently reasonable politician, of whom the "Iron Lady," Margaret Thatcher, had said, "We can do business together." Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party, fully aware that the state of his country's economy was horrendous: outputs were falling, and there was no longer any way to increase inputs. Gorbachev thought at first that he could reinvigorate the society. He soon concluded that the system could not recover without perestroika, or restructuring. To take the pressure off the economy, he would have to cut back on military spending. To rejuvenate industry, he needed Western technology and investment, and to get those, he had to take the hostility out of the East-West relationship.