ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that forces of modernization and the need to reform the economies have presented the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe with intractable dilemmas. In the fall of 1989 the magnitude of political change and the speed with which it occurred in Central and Eastern European countries caught the world by surprise. By the 1980s, the evolutionary changes in Hungary and Poland and the almost complete lack of these changes in the rigid, conservative regimes in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany had become emblematic of divergent political developments within the Soviet sphere of influence. The German Democratic Republic leadership made an effort to protect the consumer sector, whereas significant cuts were made, for example, in industrial investment. Privileges associated with leadership positions—including modern housing, foreign cars, access to otherwise almost inaccessible western goods, and travel to the West—increasingly attracted attention and furthered frustration.
