In the span of just three months the unthinkable had happened: all of eastern Europe had broken free of Communist domination and won the right to resume the independent national existences that Nazi aggression had extinguished beginning in 1938. The force of popular revulsion against the Stalinist regimes imposed after World War II was the cause of the explosion, and advanced communications technology permitted the news to spread quickly, triggering revolts in one capital after another. What enabled the popular forces to express themselves, and succeed, however, was singular and simple: the abrogation of the Brezhnev Doctrine by Mikhail Gorbachev. Once it became known that the Red Army would not intervene to crush dissent, as it had in all previous crises, the whole Stalinist empire was revealed as a sham and flimsy structure. For decades, Western apologists for the Soviet bloc had argued that eastern European Socialism was somehow indigenous, even that the East Germans had developed a “separate nationality,” and that the Soviets had a legitimate security interest in eastern Europe. Gorbachev himself proved them wrong when he let eastern Europe go free in 1989.

What were his motives for doing so? Certainly the Soviet army and the KGB must have watched in horror as their empire, purchased at terrific cost in World War II, simply disintegrated. Perhaps Gorbachev calculated, in line with the “new thinking,” that the U.S.S.R. did not need eastern Europe to ensure its own security and that maintaining the empire was no longer worth the financial and political cost. At a time when the Soviet Union was in severe economic crisis and needed Western help more than ever, jettisoning eastern Europe would unburden his budget and do more than anything to attract Western goodwill. Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that Gorbachev ever intended things to work out as they did. It is far more likely that he intended merely to throw his support to progressive Communists eager to implement perestroika in their own countries and thereby strengthen his own position vis-à-vis the hard-liners in the Soviet party. His ploy, however, had three attendant risks: first, that popular revolt might go so far as to dismantle Communism and the Warsaw Pact altogether; second, that the eastern European revolution might spread to nationalities within the U.S.S.R. itself; and third, that the NATO powers might try to exploit eastern European unrest to its own strategic advantage. The first fear quickly came true, and as 1989 came to an end, Gorbachev’s foreign and domestic policies were increasingly directed toward forestalling the second and third dangers.

Concerning possible Western exploitation of the retreat of Communism, Shevardnadze expressed as early as October the Soviet Union’s desire to pursue the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and NATO military alliances. (Of course, the Warsaw Pact was in the course of dissolving from within.) Then, in November, Gorbachev warned against Western attempts to export capitalism. Western European leaders were anxious to reassure him, as was President Bush at the December 2–3 Malta summit. Only a few days before, however, Chancellor Kohl had alerted the Soviets and the world that he intended to press forward at once on the most difficult problem of all arising from the liberation of eastern Europe: the reunification of Germany. That prospect, and the conditions under which it might occur, would dominate Great Power diplomacy in 1990.

Gorbachev had every reason to fear that his second nightmare would come true: the spillover of popular revolt into the Soviet Union itself. The first of the subject nationalities of the U.S.S.R. to demand self-determination were the Lithuanians, whose Communist Party Congress voted by a huge majority to declare its independence from the party’s leadership in Moscow and to move toward an independent, democratic state. Gorbachev denounced the move at once and warned of bloodshed if the Lithuanians persisted. In January 1990 his personal visit to the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, to calm the waters provoked a rally of 250,000 people demanding the abrogation of the Soviets’ “illegal” 1940 annexation. When in that same month Soviet troops entered the Azerbaijan capital, Baku, and killed more than 50 Azerbaijani nationalists, fears arose that the Baltic states might suffer the same fate. Gorbachev let it be known that, the liberation of eastern Europe notwithstanding, he would not preside over the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.