The Sinatra Doctrine was the Soviet Union’s 1989 declaration that it would no longer use force to keep its Eastern European allies in line. The phrase was Gennadi Gerasimov’s quip to a Western reporter in October 1989 — when asked whether Moscow would intervene to save the Polish or Hungarian governments, Gerasimov replied that the Eastern European countries could now “do it their way,” the way Frank Sinatra sang about doing things. The 1989 revolutions in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania happened because the doctrine held.
The reference was pointed. The previous Soviet doctrine, the Brezhnev Doctrine, had held that the Soviet Union would use force to preserve communist rule in its allies. The Sinatra Doctrine was the negation of that principle. The 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe, which happened within months of Gerasimov’s quip, were the application of the policy in practice.
The Brezhnev Doctrine
The Brezhnev Doctrine took its name from a speech Leonid Brezhnev gave to the Fifth Congress of the Polish United Workers’ Party on November 12, 1968, in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The full text of the speech set out a theory of “limited sovereignty” for socialist states: the Soviet Union had both the right and the duty to intervene where a socialist regime was threatened with overthrow, regardless of the wishes of the population or the government.
The precedent was the invasion of Hungary in November 1956. Soviet tanks had rolled into Budapest after Imre Nagy’s government announced its withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. The invasion killed an estimated 2,500 Hungarians, executed Nagy two years later, and installed János Kádár as leader. Kádár held power for thirty-two years and was rewarded with the “goulash communism” that combined repression at home with a tolerable standard of living.
The Czechoslovakia intervention of August 1968 was the second application. Alexander Dubček’s Prague Spring, with its vision of “socialism with a human face,” had been threatening to do more than tinker with the communist system; it was threatening to demonstrate that the system could be reformed out of existence. The Warsaw Pact invasion of August 20–21 ended the experiment. Jan Palach burned himself to death in protest in January 1969; the “normalization” that followed purged roughly half a million people from public life.
The Brezhnev Doctrine was the reason that the Eastern European allies were allies — the reason their populations lived under Soviet hegemony. It worked as long as the Soviet Union was willing to enforce it. The 1981 martial law in Poland, imposed by General Wojciech Jaruzelski without a direct Soviet intervention, was the last successful application. The Soviet Union was too weak to act, Polish communists were left to do it themselves.
The Soviet Repudiation
Gorbachev’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on December 7, 1988, was the formal repudiation. He announced unilateral cuts of 500,000 in Soviet military personnel, the withdrawal of six tank divisions from Eastern Europe, and — most consequentially — the right of the peoples of Eastern Europe to choose their own political systems. The doctrine of limited sovereignty was finished. The Soviet Union, in Gorbachev’s words, would treat the Eastern European countries as sovereign members of the European community.
The new approach had been building for two years. Gorbachev’s July 1988 speech to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe had signaled the shift; the December 1988 speech to the UN institutionalized it. Gerasimov’s Sinatra joke, in October 1989, was a way of telling the foreign press that the shift was not rhetorical.
What Changed in 1989
The changes in Eastern Europe happened in the months after the speech, and they came in the order that the timing of the new doctrine allowed. Poland went first, with the June 4, 1989 elections; Hungary had effectively already started by removing the border fence in May. East Germany’s loss of population, through Hungary and Czechoslovakia, produced the crisis that ended in the Wall’s fall on November 9. Czechoslovakia’s transition in November and Romania’s in December were the last acts.
The Soviet response varied. In Poland the new non-communist government was accepted. In Hungary the change of regime was accepted. In East Germany the Soviet government issued a statement on November 9, after the Wall had been opened, saying that the question of German reunification was a matter for the two German governments — a position that the Soviet Union had rejected only a year earlier. In Czechoslovakia, the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968 was officially condemned by the Soviet government in December 1989, an explicit repudiation of the Brezhnev Doctrine.
The Romanian case is the most telling. The Ceaușescu regime fell to a popular uprising, not to a negotiated transition. Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were tried by a drumhead court and executed on December 25, 1989. The Soviet Union did not intervene to save the regime; the regime was not even worth the political cost of saving. The Sinatra Doctrine held even in the worst case.
Why It Mattered
The doctrine mattered because it changed the strategic environment. The 1989 revolutions happened because the Eastern European publics were ready for them; they were allowed to happen because the Soviet Union chose not to suppress them. The choice was Gorbachev’s, made on the basis of a calculation that the Eastern European regimes were a liability and that the cost of holding them by force was higher than the cost of letting them go. He may have underestimated the cost of letting them go; the system he had tried to save did not survive the loss of the empire. The decision was not a mistake. It was a recognition that the empire could not be held.
The Sinatra Doctrine, in this sense, is not so much a doctrine as a description of a strategic decision. The Brezhnev Doctrine had also been a description. The two together are the central fact of the end of the Cold War in Europe.