The revolutions of 1989 were a chain of mostly peaceful transitions in which the communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe collapsed or were overthrown. They began in Poland in February, at the negotiating table, and ended in Romania in December. In between, governments fell in Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria; the Iron Curtain was breached; and the Berlin Wall was opened. The British historian Timothy Garton Ash, who witnessed much of it as a reporter for the London Review of Books, called the year simply “1989.” It was, he wrote, “the year of miracles.”
Ash’s book The Magic Lantern (1990) remains the most personal and most quotable account. The standard scholarly treatment is Charles Maier’s Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (1997) and Padraic Kenney’s The Burdens of Freedom (2006).
The Polish Round Table and the June Elections
The Polish transition began nine years before it succeeded. The Solidarity trade union was founded at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk on August 14, 1980, and grew to roughly 10 million members within a year. The Soviet Union, weakened by its own troubles, did not intervene when General Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law on December 13, 1981, but the regime was never able to root Solidarity out. The union survived underground, sustained in part by the Catholic Church.
The reforms removed the external constraint. By 1988 strikes were spreading again. Jaruzelski’s government entered into Round Table talks with Solidarity on February 6, 1989. The negotiations produced an agreement on partially free elections: 35 percent of the Sejm’s 460 seats were to be openly contested, with the remaining 65 percent reserved for the Communist Party and its allies; the Senate was to be fully elected. The Communists assumed the formula would keep them in power.
The election of June 4, 1989, was a disaster for that assumption. Solidarity candidates won 99 of the 100 freely contested Sejm seats and 92 of the 100 Senate seats. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Solidarity’s intellectual leader, became prime minister on August 24, 1989 — the first non-communist to head a government in the Soviet bloc. In December 1990 Lech Wałęsa succeeded Jaruzelski as president. The transition was, in retrospect, the model.
The Hungarian Opening
The reformist wing of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, led by Imre Pozsgay, Miklós Németh, and others, had been dismantling the old order since at least 1987. The party began removing the barbed wire along the Austrian border in May 1989. On June 27 a ceremony at the border near Sopron — attended by Alois Mock and Gyula Horn, the Austrian and Hungarian foreign ministers — formally cut the fence. In September Hungary stopped distinguishing between “leaving” and “traveling” and effectively opened the border.
The Pan-European Picnic of August 19, organized by the Hungarian Democratic Opposition and the Austrian Paneuropean Movement, was supposed to be a symbolic gesture. The Hungarian authorities had been informed; the Austrian authorities had agreed to receive those who crossed. At a prearranged moment, the border guards stepped aside. Roughly 600 East Germans crossed, demonstrating the emptiness of the East German claim that its people had to be stopped “for their own good.” On October 23, 1989, the Republic of Hungary was formally proclaimed.
East Germany and the Fall of the Wall
The East German transition was the most painful. Unlike Poland and Hungary, where civil society had years to organize, East Germany had been a closed society with one of the most efficient security services in the bloc. The Stasi, by its own count, employed roughly 91,000 officers and had on file some 189,000 regular informants. The Leipzig Monday demonstrations, which had begun as prayer meetings in the Nikolaikirche in 1982, grew steadily through 1989: roughly 1,200 in early September, 20,000 by October 9, 300,000 by the end of October.
The regime’s collapse came in two stages. East Germans could not leave directly, but they could reach the West through Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw. By November more than 200,000 had gone. On November 9, the central committee announced new travel rules; spokesman Günter Schabowski, who had been poorly briefed, told the press conference the rules would take effect “immediately.” The checkpoints were overrun.
The East German state did not long survive the Wall. Free elections on March 18, 1990, produced a center-right majority committed to reunification. The two Germanys entered an economic union on July 1, 1990, and were formally reunified on October 3. The four-power status of Berlin, in place since 1945, was extinguished with the Two Plus Four Agreement of September 12, 1990.
The Velvet Revolution
Czechoslovakia’s transition was the most concentrated. It began on November 17, 1989, when riot police broke up a student march commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi closure of Czech universities. Within five days a crowd of 200,000 filled Wenceslas Square; by November 24 the entire Presidium of the Communist Party had resigned. Civic Forum, the umbrella group organized by dissidents led by Václav Havel, negotiated the formation of a new government. On December 29, 1989, Havel was elected president by the still-communist parliament. The whole transition took forty-two days.
It acquired its name — the Velvet Revolution — for the absence of violence. The two precedents that Czechs and Slovaks had in mind, the 1956 Hungarian revolution and the 1968 Prague Spring, had both ended in Soviet tanks. In 1989 the tanks did not come.
The Romanian Exception
The Romanian transition was the only one that turned violent. Nicolae Ceaușescu had built one of the most repressive regimes in the bloc. The Securitate, his secret police, ran a network of perhaps half a million informants; food was rationed so the government could pay off the foreign debt. A revolution began in Timișoara on December 16, 1989, when parishioners at the Reformed Church of Tőkés were joined by others protesting the forced removal of the dissident pastor László Tőkés. The army was ordered to fire. The protests spread to Bucharest.
On December 21, Ceaușescu addressed a rally in Palace Square. He was booed; the crowd thinned. The next day the army, having switched sides, declared itself “with the people.” Ceaușescu and his wife Elena fled by helicopter, were captured, and were tried by a hastily convened military tribunal on December 25. The trial lasted about an hour. The verdict was guilty on charges of genocide and sabotage of the state. The execution by firing squad took place that afternoon.
Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and the Edges of the Story
In Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov, the longest-serving leader in the Eastern bloc, was forced out on November 10, 1989. The transition was completed the following year. Yugoslavia, the other multinational communist state in Europe, did not have a revolution in 1989. It had a slow unraveling that began in 1991 with the declarations of independence of Slovenia and Croatia and produced four wars over the next decade. The most destructive, the Bosnian War of 1992–95, ended only with the Dayton Agreement of November 1995 and the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, the worst atrocity in Europe since 1945.
Why 1989 Happened
The structural factors are familiar. The Eastern European economies were not catching up to the West. The political legitimacy of the parties had been hollowed out by decades of unkept promises. The Soviet Union under Gorbachev would no longer use force to preserve the regimes.
The contingent factors matter at least as much. The Polish roundtable succeeded because the regime had no other option. Hungary opened the border because the reformist wing of the party concluded the old order could not last. Czechoslovakia’s transition took forty-two days because the security forces, having shot at students on November 17, decided not to do so on November 18. Romania ended in execution because the army changed sides.
The Legacy
Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, and the Baltic states (which joined the EU in 2004) are consolidated democracies with market economies. Bulgaria and Romania, which joined in 2007, are also democracies, though weaker ones. The Russian transition went differently: the trauma of the 1990s, the second Chechen war, the annexation of Crimea, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The post-Cold War settlement that 1989 produced is no longer taken for granted in Eastern Europe. It is the subject of a war.
Key sources
- Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ‘89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (Random House, 1990). The indispensable eyewitness account.
- Charles S. Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton University Press, 1997). The standard scholarly treatment.
- Padraic Kenney, The Burdens of Freedom (Central European University Press, 2006). Good on the popular character of the revolutions.
- Mark Kramer, ed., The Politics of Memory: Looking for God in the Land of the Long Night (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Useful for the afterlives of the revolutions in the archives.