The Fall of Communism

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the causes and effects of the end of the Cold War (Skill 3.D; LO G).
• Account for KC-4.2.V.C: how Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms of perestroika and glasnost, designed to make the Soviet system more flexible, failed to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of its hegemonic control over Eastern and Central European satellites.
• Account for KC-4.1.IV.E: how the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended the Cold War and produced the establishment of capitalist economies throughout Eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany, the Czech-Slovak partition, the Yugoslav dissolution, and the eastern enlargement of the European Union.
• Examine how reform-era Soviet documents (Gorbachev's UN speech of December 1988), Eastern European transition documents (Havel's 1990 New Year address), and dissolution documents (Belavezha Accords of December 1991) reinforce, adjust, or undermine each other as historical evidence (Skill 3.D in direct practice).
• Account for the principal phases of the 1989 cascade of revolutions across Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania.

Topic 9.7 covers the end of the Cold War between approximately 1985 and 1991. KC-4.2.V.C captures the internal Soviet dimension: Gorbachev's reforms of perestroika and glasnost, designed to make the Soviet system more flexible, failed to prevent the collapse. KC-4.1.IV.E captures the broader European reorganization: the Soviet collapse ended the Cold War and produced the establishment of capitalist economies across Eastern Europe, German reunification, the Czech-Slovak partition, Yugoslav dissolution, and eastern EU enlargement. The lesson is structured in four parts: Gorbachev's reforms (1985-1988); the 1989 cascade of revolutions; the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991); and the post-1989 reorganization of Europe.

Gorbachev's reforms (1985-1988). Mikhail Gorbachev's selection as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 11 March 1985 (succeeding Konstantin Chernenko, who had succeeded Yuri Andropov in February 1984; both Andropov and Chernenko had ruled briefly in declining health) introduced the principal late-Soviet reform leadership. Gorbachev was 54 at his selection, the youngest General Secretary since Stalin's elevation in 1922; his prior career had been in the Stavropol Krai Komsomol and Communist Party apparatus and as Secretary for Agriculture under Andropov. The Soviet economy at his accession faced substantial difficulties: declining oil prices (the principal Soviet hard-currency export source) had reduced foreign-exchange earnings; agricultural productivity remained well below Western European levels; consumer-goods shortages were chronic; the Soviet defense burden (approximately 15-25 percent of Soviet GDP at the early-1980s peak, compared to approximately 6 percent for the United States) was substantial; the Afghanistan war was producing rising Soviet casualties without strategic progress.

Gorbachev's reform program developed in three phases. The first phase (1985-1986) addressed visible administrative dysfunction: the May 1985 anti-alcohol campaign substantially reduced alcohol production and consumption at substantial cost to state revenue; the June 1985 selection of Eduard Shevardnadze (a Gorbachev ally) as Foreign Minister produced the substantial reorientation of Soviet foreign policy; the December 1986 release of physicist and human-rights advocate Andrei Sakharov from internal exile in Gorky (Sakharov had been confined since January 1980 over his opposition to the Afghan war) signaled the developing political opening. The April 1986 Chernobyl nuclear-power-plant disaster (the worst civil nuclear accident to that date; approximately 31 immediate deaths from the explosion and acute radiation; substantially higher long-term cancer attributions; substantial environmental contamination across Belarus, Ukraine, and parts of Russia) substantially shaped Gorbachev's subsequent commitment to glasnost: the initial Soviet attempt to suppress information about the disaster failed in the face of Western detection of the radiation plume and substantially eroded the regime's information-control capacity.

The second phase (1986-1988) introduced the principal reform programs. Glasnost ("openness") relaxed press censorship and political restrictions: previously banned books were published (Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago in 1988; Anatoly Rybakov's Children of the Arbat in 1987; Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate in 1988); the Soviet press began critical reporting on previously-unmentionable topics (the Stalinist purges; the Afghan war; the Soviet economic difficulties; environmental catastrophes); independent civic and political organizations began to operate. Perestroika ("restructuring") attempted to introduce market mechanisms into the Soviet command economy: the 1987 Law on State Enterprise gave Soviet enterprises substantial autonomy from central planning; the 1988 Law on Cooperatives legalized small private businesses; the 1990 Law on Property and the 1991 reforms attempted but failed to produce a substantial private-property-based economy. Demokratizatsiya ("democratization") loosened the Communist Party monopoly on political life: the 19th Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in June-July 1988 authorized contested elections to a new Congress of People's Deputies; the March 1989 elections produced the principal partial-democratic Soviet election with substantial reform-Communist and non-Communist successes.

The third phase (1988-1989) renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine. Gorbachev's address to the United Nations General Assembly on 7 December 1988 was the principal public renunciation: Gorbachev announced unilateral Soviet conventional-arms reductions (500,000 troops, 10,000 tanks, 8,500 artillery pieces, 800 combat aircraft over the next two years); committed the Soviet Union to "freedom of choice" in international affairs (the implicit renunciation of the right to intervene in Warsaw Pact states); and articulated the broader concept of "common European home" that anticipated the post-Cold-War European order. The substantively decisive Eastern European consequence was that the 1989 reform movements could proceed without facing the threat of Soviet military intervention that had structured Eastern bloc politics since the Brezhnev Doctrine of November 1968.

The 1989 cascade of revolutions. The Eastern European 1989 revolutions proceeded through a roughly six-month cascade in which the success of the early transitions encouraged the subsequent ones. The Polish transition was the principal early case. The Polish Communist regime under Wojciech Jaruzelski had been substantially weakened by the 1980-1981 Solidarity crisis (Topic 9.4) and the cumulative economic difficulties of the 1980s; the Polish Round Table negotiations of February-April 1989 between the Communist regime and the legalized Solidarity movement produced the partially free elections of 4 June 1989 (Solidarity won 99 of 100 seats in the partially elected Senate and all 161 of the contested Sejm seats). The Tadeusz Mazowiecki government of 24 August 1989 became the first non-Communist-led government in the Eastern bloc since 1948. The Hungarian Communist regime under Karoly Grosz (succeeding Janos Kadar in May 1988) similarly negotiated a transition through the Hungarian Round Table of June-September 1989 that produced multiparty elections in March-April 1990 and the non-Communist Jozsef Antall government of May 1990.

The Hungarian decision to open the Hungarian-Austrian border on 2 May 1989 produced the principal early-summer crisis: substantial East German emigration through Hungary to Austria and West Germany. Approximately 13,000 East Germans had crossed the Hungarian-Austrian border by early September 1989; the Pan-European Picnic of 19 August 1989 (a brief opening of the border at Sopron, Hungary, organized by Hungarian opposition activists) produced the flight of approximately 600 East Germans to Austria; the Hungarian government's formal opening of the border to East German citizens on 11 September 1989 produced approximately 30,000 additional East German emigrations through October 1989. The East German regime under Erich Honecker faced compounding pressure: the Leipzig Monday demonstrations beginning 4 September 1989 (initially approximately 1,200 protesters; reached approximately 70,000 by 9 October 1989; reached approximately 320,000 by 23 October 1989); the dismissal of Honecker on 18 October 1989 in favor of Egon Krenz; and the Politburo's botched press-conference announcement of 9 November 1989 in which Politburo member Gunter Schabowski mistakenly announced that the new travel regulations took effect "immediately, without delay." East Berliners began crossing to West Berlin within hours; the Berlin Wall was opened across all checkpoints by midnight; the principal physical symbol of the Cold War division of Europe had ended. German reunification followed under Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Ten-Point Programme of 28 November 1989 and the Two-Plus-Four Agreement of 12 September 1990; formal reunification took effect on 3 October 1990.

The Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution of 17 November to 29 December 1989 was the most rapid of the 1989 transitions. Student demonstrations on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi closure of Czech universities in 1939, met by violent police suppression on Narodni Trida ("National Avenue") in Prague on 17 November 1989, produced the rapid mobilization of the Civic Forum (Obcanske Forum) under playwright Vaclav Havel and the Slovak counterpart Public Against Violence (Verejnost proti nasiliu). The Communist regime under Milos Jakes resigned on 24 November 1989; the resulting negotiations produced the resignation of Communist President Gustav Husak on 10 December 1989 and the parliamentary election of Vaclav Havel as President on 29 December 1989. The Bulgarian transition followed a Communist Party-led pattern (Todor Zhivkov was deposed by a Politburo putsch on 10 November 1989; the resulting reform-Communist government negotiated a transition with the developing opposition; multiparty elections in June 1990 produced a temporarily Communist-led coalition that was subsequently replaced).

The Romanian transition was the violent exception. Nicolae Ceausescu's Communist regime had pursued an increasingly autocratic and personalistic course through the 1980s (the systematic destruction of historic Bucharest neighborhoods to build the gigantic Casa Poporului; the harsh anti-natalist-policy reversal that produced the orphan-institution catastrophe; the systematic Securitate surveillance). Demonstrations in Timisoara from 16 December 1989 (originally protesting the planned forced relocation of Hungarian-Reformed pastor Laszlo Tokes) escalated into a national uprising; Ceausescu's botched 21 December 1989 Bucharest balcony speech (in which he was visibly disconcerted by the crowd's hostile response) demonstrated the regime's collapsing authority; Ceausescu and his wife Elena fled by helicopter on 22 December 1989, were captured the same day, and were tried and executed on 25 December 1989 after a brief military tribunal. The post-Ceausescu National Salvation Front under Ion Iliescu took power; the December 1989 violence killed approximately 1,100 people, the only substantial death toll of the Eastern European 1989 revolutions.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991). The 1989 Eastern European revolutions and the collapse of Soviet hegemonic authority over the Warsaw Pact substantially weakened Gorbachev's domestic political position. The principal late-Soviet political development was the rise of Boris Yeltsin, the former Moscow Communist Party chief whom Gorbachev had dismissed in November 1987 and who subsequently rebuilt his political position through the late 1980s. Yeltsin was elected to the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies in March 1989; resigned from the Communist Party at the 28th Congress in July 1990; was elected Chairman of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) Supreme Soviet on 29 May 1990; and was directly elected President of the RSFSR on 12 June 1991 in the first popular Russian presidential election. Yeltsin's parallel democratic-Russian-nationalist political position substantially competed with Gorbachev's reform-Communist Soviet position.

The August 1991 Moscow coup attempt was the decisive crisis. A group of Communist hard-liners (the State Committee on the State of Emergency, including Vice President Gennady Yanayev, Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov, KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, Interior Minister Boris Pugo, and Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov) detained Gorbachev at his Crimean dacha at Foros on 18 August 1991 and announced the assumption of authority on 19 August 1991. The coup attempt collapsed within three days: Yeltsin's resistance from the Russian Federation parliament building (the "White House") in Moscow, his iconic appearance atop a tank to read the resistance proclamation, and the principal Soviet military units' refusal to execute the coup orders produced the coup's collapse on 21 August 1991. Gorbachev returned to Moscow but with substantially reduced authority; the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was suspended on 24 August 1991 and formally dissolved on 6 November 1991; the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) declared independence (or in the Lithuanian case, completed the process begun in March 1990) and were internationally recognized in early September 1991.

The Belavezha Accords of 8 December 1991 produced the formal Soviet dissolution. Yeltsin (Russia), Leonid Kravchuk (Ukraine), and Stanislaus Shushkevich (Belarus) met at the Belovezhskaya Pushcha forest in Belarus and signed the agreement declaring that the Soviet Union "as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, ceases its existence" and establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States as the loose-association successor framework. The Alma-Ata Protocol of 21 December 1991 extended the Commonwealth of Independent States to most former Soviet republics (with the exceptions of Georgia, which acceded in 1993, and the three Baltic states, which declined to participate). Gorbachev resigned as President of the Soviet Union on 25 December 1991 (the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin at 7:32 p.m. Moscow time and the Russian tricolor raised); the Soviet Union formally ceased to exist on 26 December 1991 with the Soviet of Republics' acknowledgment of the dissolution. The Cold War had ended.

The post-1989 reorganization of Europe (KC-4.1.IV.E). The collapse of the Soviet Union ended the Cold War and produced substantial reorganization of European political and economic life. The transition to capitalist economies across Eastern Europe followed varying patterns: Polish "shock therapy" under Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz from January 1990 (rapid price liberalization, currency stabilization, and privatization) produced an immediate sharp economic contraction followed by sustained growth; Hungarian and Czech transitions under more gradualist programs produced comparable longer-term outcomes; the Russian transition under Yegor Gaidar (1991-1992) and Anatoly Chubais (the principal architect of the 1992-1996 voucher privatization) produced substantial economic disruption, the collapse of GDP by approximately 40 percent through 1996, and the rise of the Russian "oligarch" class.

German reunification took effect on 3 October 1990 (the day commemorated as German Unity Day) following the Two-Plus-Four Agreement of 12 September 1990 (East Germany, West Germany, the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France) that ended the formal four-power occupation rights and recognized the unified Germany's full sovereignty. The Czech-Slovak Velvet Divorce of 1 January 1993 separated the Czech Republic and Slovakia by negotiated agreement following the June 1992 elections that produced incompatible Czech and Slovak governing coalitions. The Yugoslav dissolution after 1991 produced the principal violent transition (Topic 9.5 covered). The eastern enlargement of the European Union proceeded in waves: ten states acceded on 1 May 2004 (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, plus Cyprus and Malta); Bulgaria and Romania acceded on 1 January 2007; Croatia acceded on 1 July 2013. NATO parallel enlargement extended to most former Warsaw Pact territory by 2024 (Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary acceded in March 1999; the Baltic states, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in March 2004; Albania and Croatia in April 2009; Montenegro in June 2017; North Macedonia in March 2020; Finland in April 2023; Sweden in March 2024). Topic 9.10 will examine the European Union dimension in detail.

The Skill 3.D argument. Topic 9.7's suggested skill is 3.D (Source Argument: account for the way claims or evidence reinforce, adjust, or undermine the argument of a source). The skill applies particularly to the multi-perspective documentary record of the fall of communism. Gorbachev's reformist documents (the December 1988 UN speech; Perestroika 1987) advanced the argument that the Soviet system could be reformed within Communist Party leadership; the Eastern European transition documents (Havel's 1990 New Year address; the Solidarity 1989 election manifesto) advanced the argument that the Communist Party-led model was beyond reform and required wholesale replacement; the dissolution documents (Belavezha Accords; Gorbachev's resignation address of 25 December 1991) document the failure of the reform program and the resulting transition. Each set of documents advanced a substantive interpretation of the developing situation; the eventual outcome (system collapse rather than system reform) substantially undermined Gorbachev's reform claims and substantially confirmed the Eastern European transition documents.

Three sources framing the fall of communism: the late-Soviet reform articulation, the Eastern European transition voice, and the dissolution agreement.

1. (Causation, Skill 3.D) Examine how Gorbachev's December 1988 UN address and Havel's January 1990 New Year address advance substantially different arguments about the Communist system. How does each source's specific claims reinforce, adjust, or undermine the other's?
2. (Causation) Account for KC-4.2.V.C: how did Gorbachev's reforms of perestroika and glasnost fail to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of its hegemonic control over Eastern and Central European satellites? Cite specific reform programs and the unintended consequences they produced.
3. (Causation) Account for the cascade of 1989 Eastern European revolutions. Why did the reform pattern proceed substantially peacefully across Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria, and why was the Romanian transition the violent exception?
4. (Causation, Skill 3.D) Examine the Belavezha Accords of December 1991 as a historical document. What does the agreement's claim about the legitimate authority of the three founding republics presuppose? How was the claim contested by Gorbachev and by subsequent Russian political voices?
5. (Causation) Account for KC-4.1.IV.E: how did the collapse of the Soviet Union end the Cold War and produce the establishment of capitalist economies across Eastern Europe, German reunification, the Czech-Slovak partition, and the eastern enlargement of the European Union?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.