ABSTRACT
In 1989, a wave of popular revolutions transformed Eastern and central Europe. Communism was swept away. The Soviet Union withdrew. Only ten years earlier the Warsaw Pact and Soviet domination of central and Eastern Europe had still looked solid and unshakeable. There were difficulties, of course. Romania was showing signs of nationalist independence; its communist leader Nicolae Ceaus¸escu was much admired in the West, which courted him assiduously much to its later embarrassment. In Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the communist regimes had proved durable, though the last two countries had to be brought into conformity with tanks and guns. For two generations now the people of Eastern Europe had known nothing but communism, and those aged forty-five years and older had known only different forms of authoritarian rule before the Iron Curtain descended. The communist leaderships had claimed that they had made great social and economic advances; a golden future beckoned; hardship and suffering were only temporary, the means to greater virtue and prosperity.
