04 September 2009
Legacy of 1989 Must Be Defended
This article is excerpted from The Berlin Wall: 20 Years Later, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 2.5 MB).
By: Janusz Bugajski
The Iron Curtain disintegrated long before the Berlin Wall was dismantled in November 1989. The communist system in Eastern Europe had been in terminal decay for several years. The single-party regimes stifled human rights and political freedoms and were unable to deliver on the core justification for communism: economic performance. The disparities between East and West grew starker during the 1980s, especially as market integration boosted West European prosperity and the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact proved not to be a credible alternative to an integrated Europe.
Protest movements against communism periodically rumbled across the region, but in the summer of 1980 an earthquake shook Europe with the formation of Poland’s free trade union Solidarity. Although Solidarity was temporarily stifled and driven underground, its mass membership and farsighted leadership demonstrated that the days of Soviet-imposed communism were numbered. The only unknown was whether the system would disappear with a bang or a whimper.
Fortunately, communism no longer had the strength to resist its own expiration. Ideologically bankrupt, economically incompetent, and politically primitive, Marxism-Leninism proved another experimental dead end. Moreover, the Soviet regime that had propped up proxy governments throughout Eastern Europe no longer had the conviction or resources forcibly to suppress the “fraternal” peoples’ yearnings for pluralism and national independence.
By the time the Berlin Wall was formally breached, Poland already had achieved a democratically elected government, while Hungary and Czechoslovakia were steadily moving toward political pluralism as leaders there realized that systemic change was unavoidable.
Looking back on November 1989, it is often overlooked that while these historic events signaled the collapse of communism, they also heralded the national liberation of Central and East European states from Soviet overlordship. While communism is but a fading nightmare in these nations, their struggle to maintain state independence from an increasingly assertive Russian government continues to this day.
Indeed, officials in Moscow seek to revise the significance of 1989 by asserting that the Soviet Union did not occupy half of Europe after World War II and by underplaying how Soviet arms imposed there a repressive totalitarian system that stifled political and economic progress for almost half a century. Some of Russia’s spokesmen claim that the Kremlin benevolently dismantled the Soviet bloc and that the Cold War ended in a draw, rather than admitting that the Soviet system proved an abject failure and that it disintegrated from within.
Unfortunately, this notion of a benign or even progressive Soviet system is offered to justify current and future assertiveness. For this reason, both Europeans and Americans must vigilantly defend the real historical legacy of November 1989.
[Janusz Bugajski is the director of the New European Democracies project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. He was a senior analyst at Radio Free Europe in Munich shortly before the collapse of communism.]
