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Initially Gorbachev believed he could restructure the country by replacing hacks with doers, offering real rewards for hard work and cutting back on the consumption of vodka. In short, he counted on the restoration of discipline. It took two years for him to discover that the problems were much deeper and that the solutions would have to be much more far-reaching and disruptive. He realized, he said, that "cosmetic measures" would not work, and so "we arrived at the concept of perestroika as the revolutionary renovation of socialism, of our entire society." What this grand but vague formulation has meant in practice is the scaling back of coercion and the introduction of an unprecedented, until recently unimaginable degree of pluralism. As he put it in his 1987 book Perestroika, "It is possible to suppress, compel, bribe, break or blast, but only for a certain period."
He has tried to apply that principle at home and in Eastern Europe, where he attributed the stagnation of the economy and the discontent of the populace to "miscalculations by the ruling parties." The East European regimes had long taken it for granted that their Big Brothers in Moscow would provide the brute force that is the substitute for political legitimacy in the Marxist- Leninist system. Now all of a sudden, the No. 1 man in the Kremlin was saying he would not back them up and that they had to find a way of making a genuine social compact with their own people, or fall. Hence the most amazing events of 1989 -- and of the decade: one after another, with breathtaking speed, the communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe came tumbling down.
A Watershed in Warsaw
Poland, where major antigovernment strikes broke out in 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976 and 1980-81, mounted the first full test of Moscow's new policy. At the beginning of 1989, Polish party leader Wojciech Jaruzelski told his Central Committee that "fundamental changes" were needed to rescue the economy from work stoppages, inflation, debt, shortages and the burden of a near worthless currency. Having suppressed Solidarity for seven years and jailed or driven underground many of its leaders, the party needed the union's help. During several weeks of so-called round-table discussions with the government, Walesa and other union leaders concluded that it was Poland that needed their help. They traded a tacit pledge to refrain from further strikes for legalization of the union, an amended constitution and freer elections than those that had been held since World War II. Solidarity turned itself into a political party -- the first true opposition in the Soviet bloc -- so it could contest all 100 seats in the new Senate and 161 of the seats in the lower chamber, the Sejm. In June Solidarity won all but one of the contested seats. In August, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, editor of Solidarity's weekly newspaper, was sworn in as the first noncommunist Prime Minister in Eastern Europe since Stalin had imposed his system there 40 years ago. Society -- led, with appropriate irony, by the workers whom Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto had exhorted to unite -- had proved stronger than the state.