Revolutions of 1989

The Revolutions of 1989 were a swift wave of political change that ended Communist rule across much of Eastern Europe. In the book’s account, recognition of concealed history helped turn claims for national independence into an argument that could no longer be dismissed, while the contrast between the year’s public jubilation and its difficult aftermath unsettles the idea that the fall of Communist regimes settled the region’s political future.

History Reopened, Independence Claimed

The immediate force of the revolutions came from the recovery of facts that Communist rule had suppressed. Once the secret protocol to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact was acknowledged, the Baltic states could argue that their incorporation into the Soviet Union had been illegal in 1939 and remained so fifty years later. The book describes this recognition not as a minor archival correction but as a political opening: a claim to independence grounded in the past, which the Soviet Union had once been able to answer with force but could no longer simply silence.

That change in what could be said became a change in what could be done. The book calls this the liberation of history and presents it as a cause of the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Publicly established facts supplied movements with a case against existing rule; the waning prospect of Soviet military intervention allowed that case to be pressed without the response that had previously made it seem futile.

A Year of Accelerating Change

The revolutions moved at strikingly different speeds. The book measures the acceleration against the earlier Polish experience: what Solidarność took ten years to achieve in Poland, the Hungarians achieved in ten months, East Germans in ten weeks, and Czechs in ten days. The compressed sequence gives 1989 its sense of momentum: political change that had appeared remote began to feel possible across the region, then arrived with startling speed.

With Romania the exception, the book describes the revolutions as strikingly nonviolent. Velvet revolutions brought intellectual figures such as Václav Havel to power amid widespread celebration. People kissed in the streets, and Western European editorials invoked Francis Fukuyama’s idea of the end of history without irony. The narrator includes himself in that mood: Western Europeans, himself among them, travelled to Prague or Berlin for New Year’s. The image of the year is therefore not only the collapse of regimes, but a public conviction that the political struggle might be over.

Unequal Reactions to the Collapse

The euphoria was not shared by everyone. In Paris, the narrator’s mother welcomed the collapse of the Soviet bloc, partly because her White Russian family background had made her hostile to it, and partly because she had predicted its fall. But she objected to the credit being given to Mikhail Gorbachev. In her judgment, people had forced his hand by taking him at his word; he had not liberated them, but had tried to brake a process he had set in motion recklessly. The narrator finds this judgment persuasive while also treating Gorbachev’s contradictions as part of what makes him fascinating.

Eduard Limonov also did not share in the general joy. That contrast matters to the book’s account of the period’s political afterlife: the end of Communist rule did not produce a single, agreed moral map. In a later encounter, the narrator initially regarded Limonov as an unacceptable fascist. Reading Anna Politkovskaya’s account of the trial of forty National Bolshevik Party militants, however, he found that she had defended them as courageous people of integrity who offered hope for Russia’s moral future. Yelena Bonner likewise expressed support for the party’s members, despite the name’s troubling associations. The episode reveals how political identities formed after the collapse could cross the lines the narrator had assumed were fixed.

From Collapse to Economic Upheaval

The period’s political opening did not itself determine what would replace the old system. In Russia, Boris Yeltsin and Yegor Gaidar pursued rapid market reform, which they called shock therapy. Price liberalization produced inflation of 2,600 percent and undermined the parallel voucher-privatization scheme. On September 1, 1992, vouchers worth 10,000 rubles were mailed to Russian citizens over one year old as shares in national wealth. Inflation had so eroded their value by the time they arrived that recipients could get little more than a bottle of vodka for them; many sold them to buyers who offered roughly the price of a bottle and a half.

Among those buyers were Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who became billionaires within months. The book stresses the absence of rules, laws, a banking system, and taxation as business opened suddenly to people who had previously been forbidden to practise it. Its account thus places the post-Communist transfer of wealth beside the earlier liberation of political speech: the collapse created new possibilities, but did not ensure that the benefits of change would be shared evenly.

Political Afterlives and Reversals

The later political landscape further complicates any simple account of 1989 as a settled victory for democracy. In a subsequent Russian presidential contest, anger at democracy, the market, and the injustice associated with them had made the Communist Party a serious electoral force. The oligarchs feared that its leader, Gennady Zyuganov, might reverse their advantage. Under the loans-for-shares scheme, their banks had lent money to the state in exchange for shares in major economic assets; if the loans were not repaid, the lenders could take the shares. Because the deadline came after the election, the oligarchs joined forces to secure Yeltsin’s reelection, using their newspapers, radio stations, and television channels to present the choice as Yeltsin or chaos.

Political opposition also found new forms and encountered renewed restrictions. Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party drew provincial supporters and later organized a convention attended by several hundred delegates, while its leader argued that the party should turn its attention toward Russians living in former Soviet republics. The Ministry of Justice subsequently denied the party authorization under a law banning extremism and fascism, leaving it without the right to exist legally. After the opposition coalition The Other Russia failed to endure, Limonov created Strategy 31, whose supporters gathered on Triumfalnaya Square on months with thirty-one days; police usually outnumbered the demonstrators five to one, and arrests were routine. These later episodes do not undo the revolutions of 1989, but they show why the book treats their meaning as unfinished: the end of one political order opened a contest over the rules, resources, and freedoms of the next.