Just Finished Reading: Revolution 1989 – The Fall of the Soviet Empire by Victor Sebestyen (FP: 2009)

As I’ve said before about the 1970’s it feel odd reading about historical events you lived through. Even stranger, I feel, is reading about the behind-the-scenes events that very few people knew about at the time. If the West had been aware of this information the events of 1989 would not have been such a huge surprise to say many people and so many so called experts.

Of course Empire’s tend not to fall in a single night (or even a single year) nor do they fall for a single reason. It’s all the more impressive, therefore, that the author (a Hungarian journalist who experienced many of the events first hand and had impressive access to the main players in the decades after the events) could piece together a strong narrative spanning a half-dozen or so countries over a decade or more. It fascinated me to read the reality behind the headlines and the news reports from the time. I remembered the Wall coming down in ’89, I remember Solidarity in Poland, I remember the brief resort to street fighting in Romania to oust the dictator Ceausescu, I remember the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl but I had no idea – until now – how everything fit together and how event piled on event to bring about the collapse of a political entity many people believed would be with us into the foreseeable future. It just goes to show that even experts can be caught unawares by history as it unfolds.

Naturally people blame (or praise) Gorbachev for destroying the Soviet Union. Naturally it really wasn’t that easy or straight forward. The author maintains the Gorby facilitated the end of the USSR by effectively doing nothing. When the Western European members of the Warsaw Pact asked for help – both financial and military – to cope with growing unrest he simply said that Russia would no longer be intervening in ‘local politics’. Without Soviet ‘top cover’ there was little that Poland, East Germany or Czechoslovakia could do to protect their fragile economies or even more brittle political structures from their own people. Once one country open its borders, for example, the others had to respond before they were overwhelmed by a popular revolt. Several nations, Poland and East Germany in particular, seriously considered attempting to crush their own people to prevent things spiralling out of control (and would rather inevitable led to just that outcome) but, for various reasons, hesitated until it was too late. Only the Romanians tried, and failed, to prevent a popular revolution in their own country.

I think the thing that surprised me most, even more than the western spy networks not picking up on any of the events and conversations outlined in this book, was that, for many years, the whole of the Eastern economic system that comprised the Communist world was propped up and supported by massive loans from Western banks! In effect the Cold War lasted as long as it did because the West wanted it to! Of course if the very real alternative was hot (and no doubt radioactive) war then I fully agree with their strategy! If it was a strategy that is. Reading about the disaster that was the Soviet Empire – on many different levels – hasn’t changed my allegiance (if such a word is appropriate) to the political Left. I still very much regard myself as a Socialist and the failures outlined in great detail between these pages didn’t affect that much. The Soviet Empire definitely deserved to fail for a whole host of reasons. Luckily it did so with an incredible lack of violence again much to the surprise of everyone watching and everyone involved. Haunted by memories of 1956 and 1968 the tens of thousands of people who took to the streets to take their respective countries back where brave almost beyond comprehension. This was a gripping narrative about a truly amazing time in European political history. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to understand why the Soviets fell and what it meant for the world of today.