9 - The Anticommunist Revolts of 1989

Summary

If we associate revolutions with mass mobilization and violent regime change, then what happened in Eastern Europe in 1989 was hardly revolutionary. The avant-gardes of transformation – Poland and Hungary – showed little commotion beyond peaceful manifestations, the most important being the reburial of Imre Nagy that June. Suddenly hundreds of thousands of Hungarians appeared in central Budapest to witness the laying to rest of Nagy and other martyrs whose bones had been buried in unmarked graves after their executions in 1958. The police stood by, quiet witnesses to a last solemn act in the exit of a Party that had ruled since 1948. It was crushed in elections the following spring. In Poland, regime and opposition had spent the early months of 1989 negotiating an exit from single-party rule around a huge round table in Warsaw, and on June 4 millions of citizens lined up before polling places, sweeping the Communists out of office in a few hours of voting. If we limit our view of 1989 to these places, the old regime appears to have voluntarily self-destructed with little direct challenge from the streets.