(6 of 9)
So it was. The people were extraordinarily civil, almost good-natured, in the way they threw out their leaders. They welcomed Alexander Dubcek, the tragic hero of the original Prague Spring, back into the public spotlight. But the man of the hour was playwright Vaclav Havel, the often imprisoned leader of dissent, who has conjured up what may be the new nemesis of world communism: "the power of the powerless." On Dec. 10 what Havel called the "velvet revolution" swept away the government. In a new Cabinet of 21, there are now eleven noncommunists. The formation of rival parties has been legalized and Civic Forum, the noncommunist coalition, has decided to join in free elections likely to be held in May.
As the year came to an end, events reached a velocity that left onlookers giddy and made even some staunch anticommunists in the West applaud a bit less gleefully and start worrying that perhaps the resulting instability would be a greater threat to world peace than the old, seemingly monolithic communist menace. Yet once it happened, the whole spectacle had a look of something like inevitability. The governments of Eastern Europe had never been more than hollow administrations installed and maintained by Moscow's armed forces. They were rejected as Marxist, but even more as Russian, a double affront to the proud nationalism of countries that believed the West ended at Poland's eastern frontier. Once it became clear that Gorbachev meant what he said, the opposition -- tightly organized as in Poland or inchoate as in East Germany and Czechoslovakia -- rose up in wrath. Without the backing of the Soviet army, local satraps dared not use their security forces and probably did not know if they could trust them. The communist parties tried to buy off the people with leadership shuffles and semireforms, but that was not the point. Communist dictatorship could not be reformed; it could only be destroyed.
Demonstrations in Bulgaria -- yes, Bulgaria -- began tentatively at the end of September and then picked up momentum. Todor Zhivkov, the country's dictator for 35 years, was replaced on Nov. 10 by Petar Mladenov, who purged the Stalinist leadership, promising to legalize opposition parties and hold free elections by the end of May. That move was something of a surprise, since Bulgaria most closely identifies with the Soviet Union and was not expected to take reforms further than Gorbachev himself has done. And Gorbachev draws the line at the formation of rival parties.
The Dilemma of Democratization
In every case -- Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia -- a disbelieving but increasingly hopeful world watched and waited for a crackdown that never came. In every case, the disintegration of the communist system was hastened by economic crises. Marx was right: politics is driven by economics. But his 20th century followers were spectacularly wrong. A command economy can grow only by exploiting farmers and workers; eventually there is no incentive for the workers to work or the farmers to farm in a society in which they have no say in the allocation of resources. Giving them a say means giving them a voice -- a concept best translated into Russian as glasnost.