Victor Sebesteyn, "1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire"

British-Hungarian journalist Victor Sebesteyn covered the revolutions of 1989, and twenty years later he published this book. Even if you followed those events closely as they happened it is still worth revisiting them now, since much information that was then kept secret has now come out – some because of official commissions of inquiry launched by post-communist governments – and many of the participants have written memoirs explaining their own parts. 1989 is a good book, easy to read, covering a lot of ground in 400 pages. I'm mainly going to focus here on how Sebesteyn's account differs from others, such as Tony Judt's in Postwar.

To Sebesteyn, the fall of communism was all about money. In his account, Gorbachev and his cronies decided to abandon the Warsaw Pact states to their fates because they thought the Soviet Union couldn't afford to support them any longer. The Soviet economy had been buoyed in 1973-1985 by high prices for oil and natural gas, but once those prices fell they were staring at national bankruptcy. They pursued arms control and ratcheting down the Cold War because they desperately wanted to reduce defense spending. The memos have now been published showing that Gorbachev ordered Soviet troops to stay in their barracks throughout the turmoil of 1989, because he did not want to risk any incident that would jeapordize relations with the West. As a secret Foreign Ministry memo put it, "the satellite states were not worth keeping." (232)

Meanwhile the eastern European states were in even worse financial shape. Most of them had fallen deeply into debt to western nations. East Germany for a while paid its interest on those loans by selling dissidents to the west. The West Germans realized the power this gave them and began to use it; they helped to force the hardline Hungarian party boss Kadar from power by offering the men plotting his overthrow a one billion Deutschmark line of credit should they succeed.

So Sebesteyn's basic theory of the revolution is that bankrupt nations entered negotiations with opponents hoping for some way out of their morass, or at least to shift the blame onto someone else, but that really just showed their weakness, leading to their quick overthrow.

But of course the starring role in these events goes here to Gorbachev, as in all the accounts I have read. The key event of 1989 was the one that did not happen, a Soviet invasion. 

Sebesteyn's Gorbachev comes across as basically bored by the Warsaw Pact. He did not care about Romania or Bulgaria, did not want to waste his time on their problems, and did not want to spend a single ruble shoring up their regimes. He wanted to be a globe-bestriding, history-making figure, and he much prefered going to Berlin or London where people cheered him to grim meetings with party bosses in Warsaw or Bucharest. And he genuinely believed, in 1989, that his style of reform communism was a viable route to a better future.

Events in Russia since 1991, I think, should disabuse us of any notion that freedom for the Warsaw Pact states was inevitable. In some places, notably Romania, the economic situation has hardly improved since 1989, and many people across the region tell pollsters that things were better under communism. So from my vantage point I see 1989 as the intersection of long-term trends – economic decline and the fading of Stalinist ideology – with a short-term financial crisis and the ascension of a clique of Soviet leaders who chose not to intervene when people in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia rose up against their leaders and East Germans voted with their feet in favor of the west.