The Revolutions of 1989: Causes, Meanings, Consequences

By Vladimir Tismaneanu

Department of Government and Politics

University of Maryland (College Park)

The revolutions of 1989 were, no matter how one judges their nature, a true world-historical event, in the Hegelian sense: they established a historical cleavage (only to some extent conventional) between the world before and after 89. During that year, what appeared to be an immutable, ostensibly indestructible system, collapsed with a breath-taking alacrity. And this happened not because of external blows (although external pressure did matter), as in the case of Nazi Germany, but as a consequence of the development of insuperable inner tensions. The Leninist systems were terminally sick, and the disease affected first and foremost their capacity for self-regeneration. After decades    of   toying   with   the    ideas   of  intrasystemic  reforms     (“institutional amphibiousness”, as it were, to use X. L. Ding’s concept, as developed by Archie Brown in his writings on Gorbachev and Gorbachevism), it had become clear that communism did not have resources for readjustment and that the solution lay not within but outside, and even against the existing order...

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