An Unstable Continent, an Uncertain Union

Abstract

No one in the West had imagined that the Soviet empire would simply vanish, cave in without a war, a revolution or an invasion but, beginning In 1989, one Eastern European communist regime after another lost its grip on one-party power: Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Rumania. By January 1992, every Central and Eastern European country had freely and fairly elected governments and all were non-communist. By the end of 1991, the Soviet Communist Party had been disbanded and the Soviet Union itself had disappeared. NATO never fired a shot nor deployed a fighter jet. The Soviet Empire had simply unravelled, brought down by a mixture of internal political, economic and patriotic pressures. This rapid disintegration of communism which toppled governments, created new countries and shattered the post-Second World War order, was bound to trigger a degree of turmoil within the vast space of what used to be the Soviet Empire.