The Penguin History of the World

4 The Closing of an Era

The 1980s were to bring startling changes, but few in the Middle East, where, as the decade began, they had seemed most likely. Instead, a fundamental stagnation seemed to hang over the region. Tension had been high there in 1980, as it had been for years, and so were the hopes of most interested parties about resolving the problems presented by Israel’s appearance as a successor state to the Ottoman empire in Palestine. Except perhaps among a minority of Israelis, these hopes were to be gravely disappointed. For a time, it had looked as if the Iranian revolution might transform the rules of the game played hitherto, and some had indeed hoped so. Ten years later, though, it would still be very difficult to say what it had actually changed outside Iran, or what the true significance was of the uproar in the Islamic world that it had provoked. What had looked for a time like an Islamic resurgence could also be seen as merely one of the recurrent waves of puritanism which have from time to time across the centuries stimulated and regenerated the faithful. Clearly, too, tension owed much to circumstance; Israel’s occupation of the third of Islam’s Holy Places in Jerusalem had suddenly enhanced the sense of Islamic solidarity. Yet the attack by Iraq on Iran in 1980 led to a bloody war lasting eight years and costing a million lives. Whatever else might have been behind it, it also mattered in that conflict that Iraq was Sunni, Iran Shi’ite. Once more, Islamic peoples were divided along ancient fault-lines as well as by contemporary issues.

It soon appeared, too, that although it could irritate and alarm the superpowers (the USSR especially, because of its millions of Muslim subjects), Iran could not thwart them. At the end of 1979, its rulers had to watch helplessly when a Soviet army went into Afghanistan to prop up an errant Communist regime there against Muslim rebels. One reason why the Iranians backed terrorists and kidnappers was that that was the best (or worst) they could do. Nor, in spite of their success over their American hostages, could they get the former shah back to face Islamic justice. By successfully tweaking the eagle’s tail feathers in the hostage affair, Iran had humiliated the United States, but this soon seemed much less important than it did at the time. In retrospect, a declaration by President Carter in 1980 that the United States regarded the Persian Gulf as an area of vital interest revealed more of the future. It was an early sign of the ending of the exaggerated mood of American uncertainty and defeatism. A central reality of international politics was about to reassert itself. For all the dramatic changes since the Cuban missile crisis, the American republic was still in 1980 one of only two states whose might gave them unquestioned status as (to use an official Soviet definition) ‘the greatest world powers, without whose participation not a single international problem can be solved’. This participation in some instances would be implicit rather than explicit, but it was a fundamental datum of the way the world worked.

History, moreover, has no favourites for long. Although some Americans had been frightened by Soviet strength from the Cuban crisis to the invasion of Afghanistan, there were plentiful signs by the late 1970s that the Soviet rulers were in difficulties. They had to face a truism that Marxism itself proclaimed: that consciousness evolves with material conditions. Two results, among others, of real but limited relaxation in Soviet society were an evident dissidence, trivial in scale but suggesting a growing demand for greater spiritual freedom, and a less explicit, but real, groundswell of opinion that further material gains should be forthcoming. The Soviet Union nevertheless continued to spend colossal sums on armaments (about a quarter of its GDP in the 1980s). Yet these could hardly suffice, it appeared. To carry even this burden, western technology, management techniques and, possibly, capital would be needed. What change might follow on that was debatable, but that there would be change was certain.

However, by 1980, there had grown even stronger the most compelling tie between the two superpowers. For all the huge effort by the Soviet Union to give itself greater nuclear strike-power over the United States, superiority at such a level is a somewhat notional matter. The Americans, with their gift for the arresting slogan, concisely summed up the situation as MAD; that is to say, both countries had the capacity to produce ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’, or, more precisely, a situation in which each of two potential combatants had enough striking power to ensure that, even if a surprise attack deprived it of the cream of its weapons, what remained would be sufficient to ensure a reply so appalling as to turn its opponent’s cities into smoking wildernesses and leave its armed forces capable of little but attempting to control the terrorized survivors.

This bizarre possibility was a great moderating force. Even if madmen (to put the matter simply) are occasionally to be found in seats of power, Dr Johnson’s observation that the knowledge that you are to be hanged wonderfully concentrates the mind is applicable to collectivities threatened with disaster on this scale: the knowledge that a blunder may be followed by extinction is a great stimulus to prudence. Here may well lie the most fundamental explanation of a new degree of co-operation, which had already been shown in the 1970s by the United States and the Soviet Union in spite of their specific quarrels. A 1972 treaty on defensive missile limitation had been one of its first fruits; it owed something to a new awareness on both sides that science could now monitor infringements of such agreements (not all military research made for an increase of tension). In the following year talks began on further arms limitations, while another set of discussions began to explore the possibility of a comprehensive security arrangement in Europe.

In return for the implicit recognition of Europe’s post-war frontiers (above all, that between the two Germanys), the Soviet negotiators had finally agreed in 1975 at Helsinki to increase economic intercourse between eastern and western Europe and to sign a guarantee of human rights and political freedom. The last was, of course, unenforceable. Yet it may well have had more importance than the symbolic gains of frontier recognition to which the Soviet negotiators had attached much significance. Western success over human rights was not only to prove a great encouragement to dissidents in Communist Europe and the USSR, but side-stepped old restraints on what had been deemed interference in the internal affairs of Communist states. Gradually there began to arise public criticisms that were in the end to help to bring about change in eastern Europe. Meanwhile, the flow of trade and investment between the two Europes began almost at once to increase, though also very slowly. It was the nearest approach so far to a general peace treaty ending the Second World War, and it gave the Soviet Union what its leaders most desired – assurance of the security of the territorial settlement that was one of the major spoils of victory in 1945.

For all that, Americans were very worried about world affairs as 1980, the year of a presidential election, approached. Eighteen years before, the Cuban crisis had shown the world that the United States was top dog. It had then enjoyed superior military strength, the (usually dependable) support of allies, clients and satellites the world over, and the public will to sustain a world diplomatic and military effort while grappling with huge domestic problems. By 1980, many of its citizens felt the world had changed and were unhappy about it. When the new Republican president, Ronald Reagan, took office in 1981, his supporters looked back on a decade of what seemed increasing American powerlessness. He inherited an enormous budgetary deficit, disappointment over what looked like recent advances by Soviet power in Africa and Afghanistan, and dismay over what was believed to be the disappearance of an American superiority in nuclear weapons enjoyed in the 1960s.

In the next five years President Reagan surprised his critics; he was to restore the morale of his countrymen by remarkable (even if often cosmetic) feats of leadership. Symbolically, on the day of his inauguration, the Iranians released their American hostages (many Americans believed the timing of the release to have been stage-managed by the new administration’s supporters). But this was by no means the end of the troubles the United States faced in the Middle East and the Gulf. Two fundamental difficulties did not go away – the threat posed to international order in that area while Cold War attitudes endured, and the question of Israel. The war between Iran and Iraq was evidence of the first danger, many people thought. Soon, the instability of some Arab countries became more obvious. Ordered government virtually disappeared in the Lebanon, which collapsed into civil war disputed by bands of gunmen patronized by the Syrians and Iranians. As this gave the revolutionary wing of the PLO an even more promising base for operation than in the past, Israel took to increasingly violent and expensive military operations on and beyond her northern borders. There followed in the 1980s a heightening of tension and ever more vicious Israeli–Palestinian conflict. More alarming still to Americans, Lebanon descended further into anarchy in which, following the arrival of United States marines, bombs exploded at the American embassy and its marines’ barracks, killing over 300 people in all.

The United States was not alone in being troubled by these enduring ills. When the Soviet Union sent its soldiers to Afghanistan (where they were to stay bogged down for most of the next decade), Iranian and Muslim anger elsewhere was bound to affect Muslims inside the Soviet Union. Some thought this a hopeful sign, believing the growing confusion of the Islamic world might induce caution on the part of the two superpowers, and perhaps lead to less unconditional support for their satellites and allies in the region. This mattered most, of course, to Israel. Meanwhile, the more alarming manifestations and rhetoric of the Iranian revolution made some think that a conflict of civilizations was beginning. Iran’s aggressive puritanism, though, also caused shivers among conservative Arabs and in the oil-rich kingdoms of the Gulf – above all, Saudi Arabia.

There were indeed numerous signs of what looked like spreading sympathy for radical Islamism in the 1980s. Even the military regime in Pakistan (a country that had been founded by a whisky-swilling secular Muslim) imposed Islamic orthodoxy, albeit as part of a very interest-based Jihad against the Soviet infidels in neighbouring Afghanistan. North Africa presented more alarming evidence of radical Islamic feeling as the decade advanced, less importantly in the bizarre sallies and pronouncements of the excited dictator of Libya – who feared Islamism as much as he hated the United States – than in next-door Algeria. That country had made a promising start after winning its independence, but by 1980 its economy was flagging, the consensus that had sustained the independence movement was crumbling, and emigration to look for work in Europe seemed the only outlet available for the energies of many of its young men. In the 1990 Algerian elections, an Islamist party won a majority of votes for the first time in any Arab country. In the previous year a military coup in the Sudan had brought a military and militant Islamic regime to power there that at once suppressed the few remaining civic freedoms of the people of that unhappy land.

None the less, for all the attractions of Islamic radicalization, there were plentiful signs by 1990 that conservative Arab politicians, as well as their liberal oppositions, were antagonized enough for indigenous resistance to the fundamentalists sometimes to be effective. But the political events of the Middle East were to obscure these signs for a very long time. The ruler of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, patronized by the Americans and the major trouble-maker of the Middle East, was only tactically and pragmatically a supporter of Islam. Although a Muslim by upbringing, he led a secular Ba’athist regime actually based on patronage, family and the self-interest of soldiers. He sought power and technological modernization as a way to it, and there is no evidence that the welfare of the Iraqi people ever concerned him. When he launched his war on Iran, the prolongation of the struggle and evidence of its costs were greeted with relief by other Arab states – notably the other oil-producers of the Gulf – because it appeared at the same time to pin down both a dangerous bandit and the Iranian revolutionaries whom they feared. It was, however, less pleasing to them that the war distracted attention from the cause of the Palestinian question and unquestionably made it easier for Israel to deal with the PLO.

During nearly a decade of alarums and excursions in the Gulf, some of which raised the spectre of further interference with western oil supplies, incidents seemed at times to threaten a widening of armed conflict, notably between Iran and the United States. Meanwhile, events in the Levant embittered the stalemate there. Israel’s continuing occupation of the Golan Heights, her vigorous operations in Lebanon against Palestinian guerrilla bands and their patrons, and her government’s encouragement of further Jewish immigration (notably from the USSR) all helped to buttress her against the day when she might once again face united Arab armies. At the end of 1987, however, there came the first outbreaks of violence among Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories. They persisted and grew into an intermittent but what would prove enduring insurrection, the intifada, The PLO, despite winning further international sympathy by officially recognizing Israel’s own right to exist, was none the less in a disadvantaged position in 1988, when the Iraq–Iran War finally ended. In the following year Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, died and there were signs that his successor might be less adventurous in support of the Palestinian and the fundamentalist Islamic causes.

During the Iraq–Iran War, the United States had favoured Iraq, in part because of American exaggeration of the fundamentalist threat. When, nevertheless, the Americans found themselves at last face-to-face at war in the Gulf with a declared enemy, it was with the Iraqis, not the Iranians. In 1990, after making a generous peace with Iran, Saddam Hussein took up an old border dispute with the sheikhdom of Kuwait. He had also quarrelled with its ruler over oil quotas and prices. It is not easy to believe in the reality of these grievances; whatever they may have meant symbolically to Saddam himself, what seems to have moved him most was a simple determination to seize the immense oil wealth of Kuwait. During the summer of 1990, his threats increased. Then, on 2 August, the armies of Iraq invaded Kuwait, and in a few hours subdued it.

There followed a remarkable mobilization of world opinion against Iraq in the United Nations. Saddam sought to play both the Islamic and the Arab cards by confusing the pursuit of his own predatory ambitions with Arab hatred for Israel. Demonstrations of support for him in the streets of Middle Eastern cities proved of very low value. Only the PLO and Jordan spoke up for him officially. No doubt to his shocked surprise, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Egypt actually became partners in the improbable alliance that rapidly formed against him. Almost equally surprising to him must have been the acquiescence of the USSR in what followed. Most startlingly of all, the United Nations Security Council produced (with overwhelming majorities) a series of resolutions condemning Iraq’s actions and, finally, authorizing the use of force against her to ensure the liberation of Kuwait.

Huge forces were assembled in Saudi Arabia under American command. On 16 January 1991 they went into action. Within a month Iraq gave in and withdrew, after suffering considerable losses (allied casualties were insignificant). Yet this humiliation did not obviously threaten Saddam’s survival. Once again, the turning-point in the Middle East that so many had longed for had not arrived; the war disappointed both Arab revolutionaries and western would-be peacemakers. The greatest losers were the PLO, and Israel was the greatest gainer; Arab military success at her expense was inconceivable for the near future. Yet at the end of yet another war of the Ottoman succession, the Israeli problem was still there. Syria and Iran had already before the Kuwait crisis begun to show signs that, for their own reasons, they intended to make attempts to get a negotiated settlement, but whether one would emerge was another matter, even if, for the United States, it was clearly more of a priority than ever for this to happen.

Perhaps it was an advance that the alarming spectre of a radical and fundamentalist pan-Islamic movement had been for a time dissipated. For practical purposes, Arab unity had again proved a mirage. For all the distress, unrest and discontent with which many Muslims faced the West, there was virtually no sign that their resentments could yet be co-ordinated in an effective response, and less than ever that they would do without the subtly corrosive means of modernization that the West offered. Almost incidentally, too, crisis in the Gulf appeared to reveal that the oil weapon had lost much of its power to damage the developed world, for, though one had been feared, there was no new oil crisis. Against this background, in 1991, American diplomacy at last persuaded Arabs and Israelis again to take part in a conference on the Middle East.

Great transformations had meanwhile taken place elsewhere and they also bore upon events in the Middle East. Yet they did so only because they shaped what the United States and the USSR could do there. In 1980 the American presidential election campaigns had deliberately exploited the public’s fears of the Soviet Union. Unsurprisingly, this re-awoke animosity at the official level; the conservative leaders of the Soviet Union showed renewed suspicion of the trend of United States policy. It seemed likely that promising steps towards disarmament might be swept aside – or even worse. In the event, the American administration came to show a new pragmatism in foreign affairs, while, on the Soviet side, internal change was to open the way to greater flexibility.

One landmark was the death in November 1982 of Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s successor and for eighteen years general secretary of the Communist Party. His immediate replacement (the head of the secret service, the KGB) died soon after and a septuagenarian, whose own death followed even more quickly, succeeded him before there came to the office of general secretary in 1985 the youngest member of the Politburo, Mikhail Gorbachev: he was fifty-four. Virtually the whole of his political experience had been of the post-Stalin era. His impact upon his country’s, and the world’s, history was to be remarkable.

The conjunction of forces that propelled Gorbachev to the succession remains unclear. The KGB, presumably, did not oppose his promotion, and his first acts and speeches were orthodox (although he had already, in the previous year, made an impression on the British prime minister as someone with whom business could be done). He soon articulated a new political tone. The word ‘Communism’ was heard less in his speeches and ‘socialism’ was reinterpreted to exclude egalitarianism (though from time to time he reminded his colleagues that he was a Communist). For want of a better term, his aim was seen by many foreigners as liberalization, which was an inadequate western attempt to sum up two Russian words he used a great deal: glasnost (‘openness’) and perestroika (‘restructuring’). The implications of the new course were to be profound and dramatic, and for the remainder of the decade Gorbachev grappled with them.

What actually happened cannot have been in his mind when he started out. No doubt he saw that without radical change the Soviet economy could not provide the USSR with its former military might, sustain its commitments to its allies, improve (however slowly and modestly) living standards at home, and assure continuing self-generated technological advance. Accordingly, Gorbachev seemed to seek to avoid the collapse of Communism by opening it to his own vision of Leninism, above all by making it a more pluralist system, and by involving the intelligentsia in the political nation. The possible implication of such a change of course seems to have been concealed even from himself. Essentially, it was an admission that the seventy years’ experiment in arriving at modernization through socialism had failed. Neither freedom nor material well-being had been forthcoming. And now the costs were becoming too heavy to bear.

Ronald Reagan was soon drawing dividends on Gorbachev’s assumption of office. That Soviet policy was reflecting a new tone soon became clear in their meetings. Discussion of arms reduction was renewed. Agreements were reached on other issues (and this was made easier in due course by the decision of the Soviet leadership in 1989 to withdraw their forces from Afghanistan). In America’s domestic politics, a huge and still growing budgetary deficit and a flagging economy, which would under most presidents have produced political uproar, were for years virtually lost to sight in the euphoria produced by a seeming transformation of the international scene. The alarm and fear with which the ‘evil empire’ (as Reagan had termed the Soviet Union) was regarded by many Americans began to evaporate a little.

Optimism and confidence grew as the USSR showed signs of growing division and difficulty in reforming its affairs, while Americans were promised wonders by their government in the shape of new defensive measures in space. Though thousands of scientists said the project was unrealistic, the Soviet government could not face the costs of competing with that. Americans were heartened, too, in 1986 when American bombers were launched from England on a punitive mission against Libya, whose unbalanced ruler had been supporting anti-American terrorists (significantly, the Soviet Union expressed less concern about this than did many west Europeans). President Reagan was less successful, though, in convincing many of his countrymen that more enthusiastic assertions of American interests in Central America were truly to their advantage. But he remained remarkably popular; only after he had left office did it begin to dawn that the decade had been one in which the gap between rich and poor in the United States had widened even further.

In 1987, the fruits of negotiation on arms control were gathered in an agreement over intermediate-range nuclear missiles. In spite of so many shocks and its erosion by the emergence of new foci of power, the nuclear balance had held long enough for the first stand-downs by the superpowers. They, at least, if not other countries seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, appeared to have recognized that nuclear war, if it came, held out the prospect of virtual extinction for mankind, and were beginning to do something about it. In 1991 there were to be further dramatic developments as the Americans and the Soviets agreed to major reductions in existing weapons stocks.

This huge change in international relations cannot be disentangled from its many consequences for other nations. They have to be artificially separated to be narrated, but one could not have occurred without the other. At the end of 1980 there was little reason to believe that the peoples of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were about to see changes unmatched since the 1940s. What was already clear, though, was that the European Communist countries were finding it harder and harder to keep up even the modest growth rates they had attained. Comparison with the market economies of the non-Communist world had become more and more unfavourable to them, although this did not appear to suggest any challenge to the verdicts of 1953, 1956 and 1968, or to Soviet power in eastern Europe. The carapace provided by the Warsaw Pact seemed still to be capable of containing the social and political change crystallized over thirty years (and more, if one counts the great unwilled changes of the Second World War and its aftermath).

At first sight, Communist Europe had a striking uniformity. In each country the Party was supreme; careerists built their lives around it as, in earlier centuries, men on the make clustered about courts and patrons, or the Church. In each (and above all in the USSR itself) there was also an unspeakable and unexaminable past, which could not be mourned or deplored, whose weight hung over intellectual life and political discussion – so far as there was any – corrupting them. In the east European economies, investment in heavy industrial and capital goods had produced a surge of early growth (more vigorous in some states than in others) and then an international system of trading arrangements with other Communist countries, dominated by the USSR and rigidified by aspirations to central planning. It had also given rise to appalling environmental and public health problems, hidden as matters of state security. Increasingly and obviously, a growing thirst for consumer goods could not be met; commodities taken for granted in western Europe remained luxuries in the east European countries, cut off as they were from the advantages of international economic specialization.

On the land, private ownership had been much reduced by the middle of the 1950s, usually to be replaced by a mixture of co-operatives and state farms, although within this broadly uniform picture different patterns had later emerged. In Poland, for instance, something like four-fifths of Polish farmland was eventually to return to private exploitation even under Communist government. Output remained low, however; most east European countries could achieve agricultural yields only half to three-quarters those of the European Community. By the 1980s all of them, in varying degree, were economic invalids, with the possible exception only of East Germany. Even there, per capita GDP stood at only $9,300 a year in 1988, against $19,500 in West Germany. Other problems, too, were arising. Investment in infrastructure was falling and so was their share of world trade. Debts in hard currency were piling up. In Poland alone, real wages fell by a fifth in the 1980s.

What had come to be called the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’ (after a speech that Soviet leader had made in Warsaw in 1968) said that developments within eastern bloc countries might require – as in Czechoslovakia that year – direct Soviet intervention to safeguard the interests of the USSR and its allies against any attempts to turn socialist economies back towards capitalism. Yet Brezhnev had also been interested in pursuing détente and his doctrine reflected realism about possible dangers to international stability by breakaway developments in Communist Europe. Such dangers could be limited by drawing clearer lines. Since then, internal change in western Europe, steadily growing more prosperous, and with memories of the late 1940s and the seeming possibility of subversion far behind them, had removed some grounds for East–West tension. By 1980, after revolutionary changes in Spain and Portugal, not a dictatorship survived west of the Trieste–Stettin line and democracy was everywhere triumphant. For thirty years, the only risings by industrial workers against their political masters had been in East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia – all Communist countries.

After 1970, and even more after the Helsinki agreement of 1975, as awareness of contrasts with western Europe grew in the eastern bloc, dissident groups emerged, survived and even strengthened their positions in spite of severe repression. Gradually, too, a few officials or economic specialists, and even some Party members, began to show signs of scepticism about the efficiency of detailed centralized planning and there was increasing discussion of the advantages of utilizing market mechanisms. The key to fundamental change, nevertheless, lay elsewhere. There was no reason to believe that it was possible in any of the Warsaw Pact countries if the Brezhnev doctrine held, and had the Soviet army standing behind it.

The first clear sign that this might not always be so came in the early 1980s, in Poland. The Polish nation had retained, to a remarkable degree, a collective integrity by following its priests and not its rulers. The Roman Catholic Church had an enduring hold on the affections and minds of most Poles as the embodiment of the nation, and was often to speak for them – all the more convincingly once a Polish pope had been enthroned. It did so on behalf of workers who protested in the 1970s against economic policy, condemning their ill treatment.

The role of the Church, together with the worsening of economic conditions, was the background to 1980, a year of crisis for Poland. A series of strikes then came to a head in an epic struggle in the Gdansk shipyard. From them emerged a new and spontaneously organized federation of trades unions, Solidarity. It added political demands to the economic goals of the strikers; among them, one for free and independent trades unions. Solidarity’s leader was a remarkable, often-imprisoned, electrician and union leader, Lech Wałesa, a devout Catholic, closely in touch with the Polish Church hierarchy. The shipyard gates were decorated with a picture of the pope and open-air Masses were held by the strikers. As strikes spread, the world was surprised to see a shaken Polish government soon making historic concessions, crucially by recognizing Solidarity as an independent, self-governing trade union. Symbolically, regular broadcasting of the Catholic Mass on Sundays was also conceded. But disorder did not cease, and with the winter, the atmosphere of crisis deepened. Threats were heard from Poland’s neighbours of possible intervention; forty Soviet divisions were said to be ready in the GDR and on the Soviet frontier. But the dog did not bark in the night; the Soviet army did not move and was not ordered by Brezhnev to do so, or by his successors in the turbulent years that followed. It was the first sign of changes in Moscow that were the necessary premise of what was to follow in eastern Europe in the next ten years.

In 1981, tension continued to rise, the economic situation worsened, but Wałesa strove to avert provocation. On five occasions the Soviet commander of the Warsaw Pact forces came to Warsaw. On the last, the radicals broke away from Wałesa’s control and called for a general strike if emergency powers were taken by the government. On 13 December, martial law was imposed. There followed fierce repression and possibly hundreds of deaths. But the Polish military’s action also made Soviet invasion unnecessary. Solidarity went underground, to begin seven years of struggle, during which it became more and more evident that the military government could neither prevent further economic deterioration, nor enlist the support of the ‘real’ Poland, the society alienated from Communism, for the regime. A moral revolution was taking place. As one western observer put it, Poles began to behave ‘as if they lived in a free country’; clandestine organizations and publications, strikes and demonstrations, and continuing ecclesiastical condemnation of the regime sustained what was at times an atmosphere of civil war.

Although after a few months the government cautiously abandoned martial law, it still continued to deploy a varied repertoire of overt and undercover repression. Meanwhile, the economy declined further, western countries offered no help and little sympathy. Yet after 1985 changes in Moscow began to produce their effects. The climax came in 1989, for Poland her greatest year since 1945, as it was for other countries, too, thanks to her example. It opened with the regime’s acceptance that other political parties and organizations, including Solidarity, had to share in the political process. As a first step to true political pluralism, elections were held in June in which some seats were for the first time freely contested. Solidarity swept the board in them. Soon the new parliament denounced the German–Soviet agreement of August 1939, condemned the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, and set up investigations into political murders committed since 1981.

In August 1989 Wałesa announced that Solidarity would support a coalition government; the Communist diehards were told by Gorbachev to accept this (and some Soviet military units had already left the country). In September a coalition dominated by Solidarity and led by the first non-Communist prime minister since 1945 took office as the government of Poland. Western economic aid was soon promised. By Christmas 1989 the Polish People’s Republic had passed from history and, once again, for the second time in the century, the historic Republic of Poland had risen from the grave. Even more important, Poland, it soon turned out, led eastern Europe to freedom. The importance of events there had quickly been grasped in other Communist countries, whose leaders were much alarmed. In varying degree, all eastern Europe had been exposed to a new factor: an increasing flow of information about non-Communist countries, above all through western television (which was especially easily received in the GDR). More freedom of movement, more access to foreign books and newspapers had imperceptibly advanced the process of criticism elsewhere as in Poland. In spite of some ludicrous attempts to go on controlling information (Romania still required that typewriters be registered with the state authorities), a change in consciousness was under way.

That appeared to be so in Moscow, too. Gorbachev had come to power during the early stages of these developments. Five years later, it was clear that his assumption of office had released revolutionary institutional change in the Soviet Union too, first as power was taken from the Party, and then as the opportunities so provided were seized by newly emerging opposition forces, above all in republics of the Union, which began to claim greater or lesser degrees of autonomy. Before long, it began to look as if he might be undermining his own authority. Paradoxically, too, and alarmingly, the economic picture looked worse and worse. It became clear that a transition to a market economy, whether slow or rapid, was likely to impose far greater hardship on many – perhaps most – Soviet citizens than had been envisaged. By 1989 it was clear that the Soviet economy was out of control and running down. As ever in Soviet history, modernization had been launched from the centre to flow out to the periphery through authoritarian structures. But that was precisely what could not now be relied upon to happen, initially because of the resistance of the nomenklatura and the administration of the command economy, and then, at the end of the decade, because of the visibly and rapidly crumbling power of the centre.

By 1990 much more information was available to the rest of the world about the true state of the Soviet Union and its people’s attitudes than ever before. Not only were there now overt expressions of popular feeling, but glasnost had also brought to the Soviet Union its first surveys of public opinion through polls. Some rough-and-ready judgments could be made: the discrediting of the Party and nomenklatura was profound, even if it had not by 1990 gone so far as in some other Warsaw Pact countries; more surprisingly, the long supine and unprotesting Orthodox Church appeared to have retained more respect and authority than other institutions of the Marxist-Leninist ancien régime.

But it was clear that economic failure hung everywhere like a cloud over any liberalizing of political processes. Soviet citizens as well as foreign observers began to talk by 1989 of the possibility of civil war. The thawing of the iron grip of the past had revealed the power of nationalist and regional sentiment when excited by economic collapse and opportunity. After seventy years of efforts to make Soviet Man, the USSR was revealed to be a collection of peoples as distinct as ever from one another. Some of its fifteen republics (above all Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania) were quick to show dissatisfaction with their lot. They were to lead the way to political change. Azerbaijan and Soviet Armenia posed problems that were complicated by the shadow of Islamic unrest that hung over the whole Union. To make matters worse, some believed there was a danger of a military coup; commanders who were as discontented by the Soviet failure in Afghanistan as some American soldiers had been by failure in Vietnam were talked about as potential Bonapartes.

The signs of disintegration multiplied, although Gorbachev succeeded in clinging to office and, indeed, in obtaining formal enhancements of his nominal powers. But this had the disadvantage of focusing responsibility for failure too. A declaration of the Lithuanian parliament that the annexation of 1939 was invalid led, after complicated negotiations, to Latvia and Estonia also claiming their independence, though in slightly different terms. Gorbachev did not seek to revoke the fact of secession, but won agreements that the Baltic republics should guarantee the continued existence of certain practical services to the USSR. This proved to be the beginning of the end for him. A period of increasingly rapid manoeuvring between reforming and conservative groups, allying himself first to one and then, to redress the balance, to the other, led by the end of 1990 to compromises that looked increasingly unworkable. Connivance at repressive action by soldiers and the KGB in Vilnius and Riga early in the New Year did not stem the tide. For by then, nine Russion republics had already either declared they were sovereign or asserted a substantial degree of independence from the Union government. Some of them had made local languages official and some had transferred Soviet ministries and economic agencies to local control. The Russian republic – the most important – set out to run its own economy, separately from that of the Union. The Ukrainian republic proposed to set up its own army. In March, elections led Gorbachev once more back to the path of reform and a search for a new Union treaty which could preserve some central role for the Soviet state. The world looked on, bemused.

The Polish example had growing prestige in other countries as they realized that an increasingly divided, even paralysed, USSR would not (perhaps could not) intervene to uphold its creatures in the Communist Party bureaucracies of the other Warsaw Pact countries. This shaped what happened in them after 1986. The Hungarians had moved almost as rapidly in economic liberalization as the Poles, even before overt political change, but their most important contribution to the dissolution of Communist Europe came in August 1989. Germans from the GDR were then allowed to enter Hungary freely as tourists, although their purpose was known to be to present themselves as asylum-seekers to the embassy and consulates of the Federal Republic. When Hungary’s frontiers were completely opened in September (and Czechoslovakia followed suit), a flow became a flood. In three days 12,000 East Germans crossed from these countries to the west.

The Soviet authorities remarked that this was ‘unusual’. For the GDR it was the beginning of the end. On the eve of a carefully planned and much-vaunted celebration of forty years’ ‘success’ as a socialist country, and during a visit by Gorbachev (who, to the dismay of the German Communists, appeared to urge the East Germans to seize their chance), riot police had to battle with anti-government demonstrators on the streets of East Berlin. The government and party threw out their leader, but this was not enough. November opened with huge demonstrations in many cities against a regime whose corruption was becoming evident; on 9 November came the greatest symbolic act of all, the breaching of the Berlin Wall. The East German Politburo caved in and the demolition of the rest of the wall followed.

More than anywhere else, events in the GDR showed that even in the most advanced Communist countries there had been over the years a massive alienation of popular feeling from the regime. The year 1989 had brought it to a head. All over eastern Europe it was suddenly clear that Communist governments had no legitimacy in the eyes of their subjects, who either rose against them or turned their backs and let them fall. The institutional expression of this alienation was everywhere a demand for free elections, with opposition parties freely campaigning. The Poles had followed their own partially free elections, in which some seats were still reserved to supporters of the existing regime, with the preparation of a new constitution: in 1990, Lech Wałesa became president. A few months earlier, Hungary had elected a parliament from which emerged a non-Communist government. Soviet soldiers began to withdraw from the country. In June 1990, Czechoslovak elections produced a free government and it was soon agreed that the country was to be evacuated of Soviet forces by May 1991. In none of these elections did the former Communist politicians get more than 16 per cent of the vote. Voting in Bulgaria was less decisive: there, the contest was won by Communist Party members turned reformers and calling themselves socialists.

In two countries events turned out differently. Romania underwent a violent revolution (ending in the killing of its former Communist dictator) after a rising in December 1989, which revealed uncertainties about the way ahead and internal divisions ominously foreshadowing further strife. By June 1990 a government some believed still to be heavily influenced by former Communists had turned on some of its former supporters, now its critics, and crushed student protest with the aid of vigilante squads of miners at some cost in lives and in disapproval abroad. The GDR was the other country where events took a special turn. It was bound to be a special case because the question of political change was inescapably bound up with the question of German reunification.

The breaching of the Berlin Wall revealed that not only was there no political will to support Communism, but there was no will to support the GDR either. A general election there in March 1990 gave a majority of seats (and 48 per cent of the vote) to a coalition dominated by the Christian Democrat Party – the ruling party of the West German Federal Republic. Unity could no longer be in doubt, only the procedure and timetable remained to be settled. In July the two Germanys joined in a monetary, economic and social union. In October they united politically, the former territories of the GDR becoming provinces of the Federal Republic. The change was momentous, but no serious alarm was openly expressed, even in Moscow, and Gorbachev’s acquiescence was his second great service to the German nation.

Yet alarm in the USSR there must have been. The new Germany would be the greatest European power to the Union’s west. Soviet power was now in eclipse as it had not been since 1918. The reward for Gorbachev was a treaty with the new Germany, promising economic help with Soviet modernization. It might also be said, by way of reassurance to those who remembered 1939–45, that the new German state was not just an older Reich revived. Germany was now shorn of the old East Prussian lands (had, indeed, formally renounced them) and it was not dominated by Prussia as both Bismarck’s empire and the Weimar Republic had been. More reassuring still (and of importance to west Europeans who felt misgivings), the Federal Republic was a federal and constitutional state seemingly assured of economic success, with nearly forty years’ experience of democratic politics to build on and embedded in the structures of the EC and NATO. It was given the benefit of the doubt by west Europeans with long memories, at least for the time being.

At the end of 1990, the condition of what had once seemed an almost monolithic east European bloc already defied generalization or brief description. As some former Communist countries (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary) applied to join the EC, or got ready to do so (Bulgaria), observers speculated about a potentially wider degree of European unity than ever before. More cautious judgments were made by those who noted the virulent emergence of new – or re-emergence of old – national and communal divisions. Over all eastern Europe there gathered the storm clouds of economic failure and the turbulence they might bring. Liberation might be coming, but to peoples and societies of very different levels of sophistication and development, and with very different historical origins. Prediction was unwise and just how unwise became clear in 1991. In that year, a jolt was given to optimism over the prospects of peaceful change when two of the constituent republics of Yugoslavia announced their decision to separate from the federal state.

The ‘Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’, which had appeared as the successor to Serbia and Montenegro in 1918, had as long ago as 1929 changed its name to ‘Yugoslavia’ in an attempt to obliterate old divisions, accompanied by the establishment of a royal dictatorship. But the new kingdom was always seen by too many of its subjects, Serbs and non-Serbs alike, as essentially a manifestation of an old historical dream of a ‘Greater Serbia’. When its second king, Alexander, had been assassinated in 1934 in France, it was by a Macedonian aided by Croats, acting with the support of the Hungarian and Italian governments. The bitterness of the country’s divisions had thus soon attracted outsiders to dabble in its affairs, and local politicians to seek outsiders’ support; Croatians subsequently declared their own independence as a state when German troops arrived in 1941.

Besides its demographic and communal diversity (the Yugoslav census of 1931 distinguished Serbo-Croats, Slovenes, Germans, Magyars, Romanians, Vlachs, Albanians, Turks, ‘Other Slavs’, Jews, Gypsies and Italians), Yugoslavia also displayed wide disparities of custom, wealth and economic development. In parts of it, the Middle Ages had barely faded away by 1950, while others were modern, urbanized and contained significant industry. Overall, what were mainly agricultural economies had been impoverished by fast-growing populations. Yet Yugoslav politics between the two wars had turned out to be in the main about a Croat–Serb antagonism and this was deepened by wartime atrocity and struggle in a three-sided civil war between Croatians, the mainly Serb Communists (themselves led by the Croatian, Tito) and Serb royalists after 1941. This struggle began with a campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing launched against the 2 million Serbs of the new Croatia (which included Bosnia and Herzegovina). It ended in Communist victory in 1945, and the effective containment of the different nationalities by Tito’s dictatorship within a federal structure; this seemed to solve the old Bosnian and Macedonian problems and was likely to be able to ward off the territorial ambitions of outsiders. Forty-five years later, and ten years after Tito’s death, however, the old issues suddenly revealed themselves to be still vigorously alive.

In 1990 the Yugoslav federal government’s attempts to deal with its economic troubles were accompanied by accelerating political fragmentation. Democratic self-determination finally undid the Tito achievement as Yugoslavs of different nationalities began to cast about to find ways of filling the political vacuum left by the collapse of Communism. Parties formed representing Serb, Croat, Macedonian and Slovene interests as well as one in favour of the Yugoslav idea and the federation itself. Soon, all the republican governments, except that of Macedonia, rested on elected majorities, and new national minority parties had even begun to make themselves heard inside the individual republics. Croatian Serbs declared their own autonomy and there was bloodshed in the Serbian province of Kosovo, four-fifths of whose inhabitants were Albanian. The proclamation of an independent republic there had been a major symbolic affront to the Serbians – as well as of concern to the Greek and Bulgarian governments, whose predecessors had not ceased to cherish Macedonian ambitions since the days of the Balkan wars. In August, sporadic fighting by air and ground forces had begun between Serbs and Croats. Precedents for intervention by outsiders did not ever seem promising – though different views were held by different EC countries – and prospects for it became even less attractive when the USSR in July uttered a warning about the dangers of spreading local conflict to the international level. By the end of the year Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Slovenia had all, like Croatia, declared themselves independent.

The Soviet warning was the last diplomatic démarche of the regime. It was soon eclipsed by a much more momentous event. On 19 August 1991 an attempt was made by an uneasy coalition of some Party and KGB figures to set aside Mikhail Gorbachev by coup d’état. It failed, and three days later he was again in occupation of the presidency. However, his position was not the same; continual changes of side in a search for compromise had ruined his political credibility. He had clung too long to the Party and the Union; Soviet politics had taken a further lurch forward, in the eyes of many, towards disintegration. The circumstances of the coup had given an opportunity, which he seized, to Boris Yeltsin, the leader of the Russian republic, the largest in the Union. The army, the only conceivable threat to his supporters, did not move against him. He now appeared both as the strong man of the Soviet scene, without whose concurrence nothing could be done, and as a possible standard-bearer for a Russian chauvinism that might threaten other republics. While foreign observers waited to understand, the purging of those who had supported or acquiesced in the coup was developed into a determined replacement of Union officialdom at all levels, the redefinition of roles for the KGB and a redistribution of control over it between the Union and the republics. The most striking change of all was the demolition of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which began almost at once. Almost bloodlessly, at least to begin with, the huge creation which had grown out of the Bolshevik coup of 1917 was coming to an end. There seemed at first good grounds for rejoicing over that, although it was still unclear how much good would follow.

Nor was that easier to see as the year came to an end. With the decision taken to abandon price controls in the Russian republic in the near future, it seemed likely that not only inflation – unparalleled since the earliest days of the Soviet system – but also, perhaps, starvation too, would soon face millions of Soviets. In another republic, Georgia, fighting had already broken out between the supporters of the president elected after the first free elections there and the discontented opposition. Dwarfing all such facts, though, was the end of the giant superpower which had emerged from the bloody experiments of the Bolshevik revolution. For nearly seventy years and almost to the end it was the hope of revolutionaries around the world, and the generator of military strength that had won the greatest land campaigns in history. Now it dissolved suddenly and helplessly into a set of successor states.

The last of the great European multi-national empires disappeared when Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian leaders met at Minsk on 8 December and announced the end of the Soviet Union and the establishment of a new ‘Commonwealth of Independent States’(CIS). On 21 December 1991, a gathering of representatives from eleven of the former republics met briefly at Alma-Ata to confirm this. They agreed that the formal end of the Union would come on the last day of the year. Almost immediately, Gorbachev resigned.

It was the climax of one of the most startling and important changes of modern history. Of what lay ahead, no one could be sure – except that it would be a period of danger, difficulty and, for many former Soviet citizens, misery. In other countries, politicians were rarely tempted to express more than caution over the turn events had taken. There was too much uncertainty ahead. As for the USSR’s former friends, they were silent. A few of them had deplored the turn of events earlier in the year so much that they had expressed approval or encouragement for the failed coup of August. Libya and the PLO did so because any return to anything like Cold War groupings was bound to arouse their hopes of renewed possibilities of international manoeuvre that had been constricted first by détente between the United States and the USSR and then by the growing powerlessness of the latter.

Events in the USSR must have been followed with special interest in China. Its rulers had their own reasons for uneasiness about the direction in which events appeared to be going on the other side of their longest land frontier after the collapse of Communism there. With the Soviet Union’s disappearance, they were the rulers of the only multi-national empire still intact. Moreover, China had been engaged since 1978 in a continuing process of cautious and controlled modernization.

Deng Xiaoping came to be seen as the dominating influence in this, but he worked in a collective leadership. Scope was to be given to local and community enterprise and the profit motive. Commercial ties with non-Communist countries were encouraged. Although the new course was still defined in appropriately Marxist language, the outcome seemed to be a substantially market-driven fundamental reform of the economy. But it showed no weakening of the will to maintain the power of the regime. China’s rulers remained firmly in control and intended to do so. They were helped by the persistence of the old Chinese social disciplines, by the relief felt by millions that the Cultural Revolution had been left behind, by the cult (qualified though it might be) of the benefits of the revolution, and by the policy (contrary to that of Marxism as still expounded in Moscow until 1990) that economic rewards should flow through the system to the peasant. This built up rural purchasing power and that made for contentment in the countryside. There was a major swing of power away from the rural communes, which in many places practically ceased to be relevant, and by 1985 the family farm was back as the dominant form of rural production over much of China.

Village industrial and commercial enterprise emerged from the industrial communes and ‘brigades’ of the era of the Great Leap Forward. By the mid-1980s a half of rural income was drawn from industrial employment. Special Economic Zones – enclaves where foreigners could invest and benefit from low Chinese wages – were set up, mostly in regions where foreign concessions had existed prior to the 1940s. By the end of the decade, major private Chinese companies had emerged, many of them made from what had been collective enterprises in the southern provinces, or from joint ventures with foreigners. Urbanization intensified, and exports grew very rapidly; for the first time since the 1930s China was again a part of the world economy.

The new policy was not without costs, however. Growing urban markets encouraged farmers and gave them profits to plough back, but the city- dwellers began to feel the effects of rising prices. As the decade progressed, domestic difficulties increased. Foreign debt had shot up and inflation was running at an annual rate of about 30 per cent by the end of the decade. There was anger over evidence of corruption, and divisions in the leadership (some following upon deaths and illness among the gerontocrats who dominated the CCP) were widely known to exist. Those believing that a reassertion of political control was needed began to gain ground, and there were signs that they were manoeuvring to win over Deng. Yet western observers and perhaps some Chinese had been led by the policy of economic liberalization to take unrealistic and over-optimistic views about the possibility of political relaxation. The exciting changes in eastern Europe stimulated further hopes of this. But the illusions suddenly crumbled.

As 1989 began, China’s city-dwellers were feeling the pressures both of the acute inflation and of an austerity programme that had been imposed to deal with it. This was the background to a new wave of student demands. Encouraged by the presence of sympathizers with liberalization in the governing oligarchy, they demanded that the Communist Party and government should open a dialogue with a newly formed and unofficial student union about corruption and reform. Posters and rallies began to champion calls for greater ‘democracy’. The regime’s leadership was alarmed, refusing to recognize the union, which, it was feared, might be the harbinger of a new Red Guards movement. As the seventieth anniversary of the May 4th Movement approached, activists invoked its memory so as to give a broad patriotic colour to their campaign. They were not able to arouse much support in the countryside, although there were sympathetic demonstrations in many cities, but, encouraged by the obviously benevolent attitude of the general secretary of the CCP, Zhao Ziyang, they began a mass hunger strike that won widespread popular sympathy and support in Beijing. It had started only shortly before Gorbachev arrived in the capital for a state visit; his visit, instead of providing further reassuring evidence of China’s international standing, only served to remind people of what was going on in the USSR as a result of policies of liberalization. This cut both ways, encouraging would-be reformers and frightening conservatives.

By this time the most senior members of the government, including Deng Xiaoping, seem to have become thoroughly alarmed. Widespread disorder might be in the offing; they believed China faced a major crisis. Some feared a new Cultural Revolution if things got out of control. On 20 May 1989 martial law was declared. There were signs for a moment that a divided government might not be able to impose its will, but the army’s reliability was soon assured. The repression that followed two weeks later was ruthless. The student leaders had moved the focus of their efforts to an encampment in Beijing in Tiananmen Square, where, forty years before, Mao had proclaimed the foundation of the People’s Republic, and they had been joined there by other dissidents. From one of the gates of the old Forbidden City a huge portrait of Mao looked down on the symbol of the protesters: a plaster figure of a ‘Goddess of Democracy’, deliberately evocative of New York’s Statue of Liberty.

On 2 June the first military units entered the suburbs of Beijing on their way to the square. There was resistance with extemporized weapons and barricades that they forced their way through. On 3 June the demonstrators were overcome by rifle-fire, tear-gas and a brutal crushing of the encampment under the treads of tanks that swept into the square. Killing went on for some days, mass arrests followed (perhaps as many as 10,000 in all). Much of what happened took place before the eyes of the world, thanks to the presence of foreign film-crews who had for days familiarized television audiences with the demonstrators’ encampment.

Foreign disapproval was almost universal, and the damage to the CCP’s authority inside China was substantial, not least since the crackdown had split it right down the middle. Zhao Ziyang, who had opposed using military force, was placed under house-arrest in Beijing (he died, still under house-arrest, but without ever being tried, in 2005). Obviously Deng and many of the old guard felt they had faced down a grave threat. It is probable, too, that they acted in a way deplored and opposed by many of their fellow Chinese. There was disorder, some of it serious, in over eighty cities, and the army encountered resistance in some working-class districts of Beijing. Yet the masses did not rise to support the protesters, and most of China was entirely untouched by the protests. Much was to be made in future years of Tiananmen as evidence of the Chinese regime’s disregard of human rights. Still, it cannot be confidently asserted that China would have been bound to benefit if the Party had given way to the student movement. More Asian lives were shattered by banking fiascos in the 1990s than in China’s troubles in 1989.

Although the CCP and ruling hierarchy were somewhat in disarray, vigorous attempts to impose political orthodoxy followed. China, it was soon clear, was not going to go the way of eastern Europe or the USSR. But where was it going? Deng soon made it clear that economic liberalization was to continue unhindered, and even at a scale greater than anything seen prior to 1989. Soon Chinese and foreigners alike were wondering how much influence the Party really had on the rampant economic development. Some of it seemed very western. But it did not take much looking, behind company walls or in the smoke-filled rooms of power, to see more than a few traces of China’s long history and of the challenges and opportunities it provided its people.