ABSTRACT
Mikhail S.Gorbachev deserves credit for having been the destroyer, albeit unintentionally, of the hard core of the evil Soviet empire-the Soviet Union; was he, then, also the liberator of its soft extension-Eastern Europe?1 Others have been claiming the laurel: the Reagan administration for having challenged Moscow into an arms race that would make its control over the area unaffordable; left-wing critics of this policy for having implanted in Soviet minds alternative notions of security; human-rights activists for having undermined the edifice of repression that sustained communist rule. There are also theories that the outcome was inevitable or-on the contrary-accidental. They are less rewarding analytically, although accidents do happen, even inevitably, and the belief in the inevitability of events can be an important incentive for action as well as inaction.
