Differing Regime Changes and Outcomes, 1989–2004

Abstract

When Gorbachev called for reforms of the communist (or “socialist”, as communist leaders and ideologues called it) political and economic system and started to promote the policy of non-interference in domestic affairs of other “socialist” countries after he took over the Soviet party and communist bloc leadership in 1985, the communist regimes in Poland and Hungary were more or less already “prepared” for their inevitable departure to history. Even more so, leading intellectuals and a significant majority of the wider population in the two countries expected from the changes in Soviet policy at least two main things: firstly, full freedom from Soviet dominance and control over their national and individual policy choices and, secondly, a complete abolishment of communist party rule in their countries with all accompanying political and socio-economic practices that were never their real choice. The situation was a bit different in the other European communist states. While in Czechoslovakia the members of the not very numerous dissident groups hoped that Gorbachev’s reforms would bring changes to the orthodox communist regime and its practices, in the Balkans neither the vast majority of ordinary people nor their intellectual elite noticed that the changes in Soviet policy may bring any changes to communist party rule in their respective countries.