ABSTRACT
The Soviet bloc did not weather the storm of Solidarity well. Deeply conscious of a deteriorating economic situation and of a technological inadequacy made all the more apparent by developments in the arms race, the communist states of eastern Europe were further disadvantaged by the gerontocracy which dominated the Kremlin for most of the first half of the 1980s. To make matters more difficult, the west changed after 1980; it adopted more right-wing policies and with them a more truculent tone. It no longer hesitated to deride the pathetic economic performance and the woeful social provision which socialism à la russe provided for itself and its outer empire in eastern Europe. Western powers were able to reassert their influence in Grenada and the Falkland Islands whilst the marxist presence in Africa crumbled and Afghanistan became a disaster for the Soviets. A new broom arrived in Moscow in 1985 but it was already too late. In each state communist power had weakened.
