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.
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© 1995 Louise B. van Tartwijk-Novey
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van Tartwijk-Novey, L.B. (1995). An Unstable Continent, an Uncertain Union. In: The European House of Cards. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23956-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23956-6_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-62125-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-23956-6
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