ABSTRACT
In September 1989 the Solidarity party, an arm of the Polish anticommunist labor movement, took control of the government in Poland after the party had earlier won all parliamentary seats. In the same month, Hungary opened its borders with Austria, thus permitting huge numbers of refugees to flee Eastern Europe and particularly East Germany. Two months later the Berlin Wall was opened and the East German government collapsed. Also, in the same month that Solidarity achieved a massive election victory in Poland, Alexander Dubček, who had been taken into custody by occupying Soviet forces in Czechoslovakia in 1968, addressed a rally of 300,000 in Prague. Mounting protests against the communist regime throughout Czechoslovakia finally led to the resignation of its Communist government in late December. These events throughout Eastern Europe soon spread to the Soviet Union where pressures for reform had been building. Finally, in December 1991, the Soviet Union was officially abolished and Russia, the Ukraine, and Byelorussia created the Commonwealth of Independent States, thus bringing to an end seventy-four years of Communist control. Despite the appearance of impregnability, the swiftness with which these governments collapsed is testimony to how corrupt and diseased their internal structures were.
