Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Why did Communism collapse so precipitously in 1989? We should not indulge the sirens of retrospective determinism, however seductive. Even if Communism was doomed by its inherent absurdities, few predicted the timing and the manner of its going. To be sure, the ease with which the illusion of Communist power was punctured revealed that these regimes were even weaker than anyone supposed, and this casts their earlier history in a new light. But illusory or no, Communism lasted a long time. Why did it not last longer? One answer is a version of the ‘domino theory’. Once Communist leaders started falling in one place their legitimacy elsewhere was fatally impaired. The credibility of Communism rested in part upon its claim to embody necessity, to be the logical product of historical progress, a fact of political life, an inevitable presence on the modern landscape. Once this was shown to be palpably untrue—in Poland, for example, where Solidarity had apparently put History into reverse—then why continue to believe it in Hungary, or Czechoslovakia? We have already seen that the example of others clearly weighed in the balance.