Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Did the revolutions of 1989 have anything to do with the collapse of communism in Europe?trying to find out the reasoning of the collapse of...

The revolutions of 1989 certainly did have something to do
with the collapse of communism in Europe.  It was these revolutions that led ot the end
of communism in countries like Poland where the revolutions happened.  However, it is
not really possible to say that those revolutions themselves caused communism to
collapse.  Instead, the revolutions and the collapse of communism were one and the same
thing.


This is why, for example, we see the following line
about the Polish revolution in the link below:


readability="13">

In early 1989, as part of perestroika, Polish
leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski (1923–) invited Solidarity, the popular workers'
union, to become part of a coalition, or combination, government still to be led by the
Communist Party.



The
important phrase here is "as part of perestroika."  This shows that the beginning of
Poland's revolution were caused by Gorbachev's perestroika movement.  Later on, the link
tells us that


readability="9">

Rather than sending in Soviet forces to restore
the Communist Party to power as past Soviet leaders would have done, Gorbachev
encouraged the Polish Communist Party to support the new government. Gorbachev realized
that the use of force would likely trigger riots and jeopardize the Soviet Union's
chances of getting much-needed economic aid from the
West.



Once again, we see the
centrality of Gorbachev.  It was his decision to allow the revolution to continue that
really sealed the collapse of communism.


Therefore, we have
to say that it was Gorbachev's policies that led to the collapse of communism.  The
revolutions were just the mechanism by which communism collapsed, not the cause of its
collapse.

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