ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to map out some ways of understanding the relative significance of the different origins of the historic change in European history. Economic factors played an important and probably decisive role. In the chain of events leading to the collapse of the socialist regimes of Eastern Europe, the role of the economic problems facing the socialist countries is the first factor that requires consideration. Throughout the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, Soviet policy towards the region confronted an inevitable dilemma: either to enforce ideological orthodoxy and political cohesion or to promote the development of more viable, legitimate and stable regimes in Eastern Europe. The collapse of the regime came with astonishing suddenness in Romania, which suffered from a series of special factors that made a violent denouement unavoidable. Domestic economic organisation and ineffective policies were, however, not the only, or even the dominant, reason for economic failure.
