Nineteen eighty-nine was a pivotal year in the twentieth century. The Berlin Wall crumbled with startling swiftness. The unification of Germany rapidly followed. Eastern Europe – Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Romania – freed themselves from Communism. The Soviet Baltic republics of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia held massive demonstrations that eventually led to their independence in 1991 and contributed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
According to 2017 book, “Gorbachev: His Life and Times,” these events blindsided the Soviet leadership. Gorbachev was asleep the night crowds of East Germans swarmed across the border and joined West Germans in climbing atop the wall to celebrate by starting to break it down with pickaxes. Overall, Gorbachev was preoccupied with internal Soviet economic and political problems – food shortages; almost entirely absent from stores were televisions, refrigerators, washing machines; Communist hardliners and radical liberals were at each other’s throats. “Gorbachev really did not have time, and so the (the issue of Eastern Europe and the demise of the Soviet Union) was for us of secondary importance,” recalled a Gorbachev aide. “Eastern Europe was on the back burner.”