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طبعا لم يذكر ان روسيا احتلت هذه المناطق في القرن ال ١٩ اساسا
In an authoritarian system power is indivisible—relinquish it in part and you must eventually lose it all.
In the USSR there were no independent or even semi-autonomous institutions for critics and reformers to mobilize on their behalf: the Soviet system could only ever have been dismantled from inside and by initiative coming from above.
This was a remarkable and unprecedented feat. No-one could have predicted it in 1984, when Chernenko died, and no-one did.
Preoccupied with ‘peace,’ ‘stability,’ and ‘order,’ many West Germans thus ended up sharing the point of view of the Eastern politicians with whom they were doing business. Egon Bahr, a prominent Social Democrat, explained in January 1982 (immediately following the declaration of martial law in Poland) that Germans had renounced their claim to national unity for the sake of peace and the Poles would just have to renounce their claim to freedom in the name of the same ‘highest priority.’
مهم
The Monday gatherings in Leipzig, now a regular fixture, had grown to 90,000 by the week following Gorbachev’s speech,
زي الجمعات ايام الثورة
What is clear, however, is that neither the Party (as in Hungary), nor the opposition (as in Poland) can claim much credit for the course of events.
فقط الشعب
because it forestalled ‘reform’ and precipitated elections before the parties or the voters were ‘ready’.
سبحان الله
The German uprising of 1989, then, was perhaps the only truly popular—i.e. mass—revolution of that year (and indeed the only successful popular revolt in German history).
The Czechoslovak Communists were actually rather successful at maintaining total control to the very end.
مهم
Havel and his friends from Charter 77 formed Občanské Fórum (Civic Forum), an informal and fluid network that metamorphosed within days from a debating society to a civic initiative and thence into a shadow government.
‘velvet revolution’—was
It was not just Havel’s multiple incarcerations and his unflinching record of moral opposition to Communism that placed him upon this pedestal: it was also his distinctively apolitical disposition.
It was the enduring presence of this sizeable core of Communist supporters—together with the much larger penumbra of apolitical citizens not sufficiently dissatisfied to protest their condition—that had led dissident writers like Ludvík Vaculík to question the likelihood of great changes in the immediate future.
Because the Romanian leader was happy to criticize the Russians (and send his gymnasts to the Los Angeles Olympics), Americans and others kept quiet about his domestic crimes.28
In 1984 the minimum marriage age for women was reduced to fifteen.
in 1986 a program of horse-breeding to substitute for motorized vehicles was introduced. Horse-drawn carts became the main means of transport and the harvest was brought in by scythe and sickle.
The enduring physical incarnation of this monomaniacal urge was to be the country’s capital, scheduled for an imperial make-over on a scale unprecedented since Nero. This project for the ‘renovation’ of Bucharest was to be aborted by the coup of December 1989; but enough was done for Ceauşescu’s ambition to be indelibly etched into the fabric of the contemporary city. A historic district of central Bucharest the size of Venice was completely flattened. Forty thousand buildings and dozens of churches and other monuments were razed to make space for a new ‘House of the People’ and the
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يانهار ابيض، زي مين؟!
visual encapsulation of totalitarian rule.
Portraits of the Party leader and his wife were everywhere; his praise was sung in dithyrambic terms that might have embarrassed even Stalin himself
But so long as he had the backing of the secret police, the Securitate, Ceauşescu appeared untouchable. Appropriately enough, then, it was the Securitate who precipitated the regime’s fall when,
At first the army had appeared to back the dictator, occupying the streets of the capital and firing on demonstrators who tried to seize the national television studios. But from December 22nd the soldiers, now directed by a ‘National Salvation Front’ (NSF) that took over the television building, switched sides and found themselves pitted against heavily armed Securitate troops.
As later events would show, the apparatus that had ruled under Ceauşescu remained remarkably intact, shedding only the Ceauşescu family itself and their more egregiously incriminated associates.
Ceauşescu were swept away, but the police, the bureaucracy and much of the Party remained intact and in place.
Romania still had a very long road to travel.
The significant Turkish minority in Bulgaria (some 900,000 in a population of fewer than nine million) was a tempting target: not only was it ethnically distinct and of a different religion but it was also the unfortunate heir and symbol of an era of hated Ottoman rule only now passing from direct memory.
In 1984 it was officially announced that the Turks of Bulgaria were not ‘Turks’ at all but forcibly-converted Bulgarians who would now be restored to their true identity.
At the very least, Bulgaria successfully avoided the catastrophe awaiting Yugoslavia: on December 29th, in the face of angry nationalist protests, Muslims and Turks were granted full and equal rights. By 1991, a mainly Turkish party, the Movement for Rights and Freedom, had secured enough electoral backing to hold the balance of seats in the country’s national Assembly.
all revolutions spread in this way, corroding the legitimacy of established authorities by cumulative example. That is what happened in 1848, 1919 and, in a minor key, in 1968.
معناها ان ١٩١٩ لم تكن ثورة في مصر لوحدها
One novel factor was the role of the communications media. Hungarians, Czechs and Germans in particular were able to see their own revolution on the television news each evening.
The second marked characteristic of the revolutions of 1989 was their pacific quality.
be sure, such considerations did not inhibit the Communist authorities in China,
مثل اين :'
In the calculus of self-interest the balance of advantage to most Communist bureaucrats and party apparatchiks was rapidly swinging the other way—better to swim with the current than be washed away in a tidal wave of change. That calculation might have looked different had the crowds been angry or their leaders belligerently determined to wreak revenge upon the old order. But for many reasons—including the example of Tiananmen itself, unfolding on television the very day of the Polish elections—the men and women of 1989 consciously eschewed violence.
مهم
The opposite of Communism was not ‘capitalism’ but ‘Europe’.
Solidarity was financed largely from the US and it was the US that gave the most insistent official encouragement to protesters in Berlin and elsewhere—once it was clear that they would probably win.
For most people who had lived under Communism, liberation by no means implied a yearning for untrammeled economic competition, much less the loss of free social services, guaranteed employment, cheap rents or any of Communism’s other attendant benefits.
Once an imperial metropole had so publicly acknowledged that it would not, could not hang on to its colonial periphery—and had been universally acclaimed for saying so—its colonies were lost and with them the empire’s indigenous collaborators. All that remained to be determined was the manner and direction in which they fell.
In 1849 Russian intervention had sealed the fate of the Hungarian and other revolutions of that year; in 1989 Russian abstention helped assure their success.
Gorbachev was letting Communism fall in eastern Europe in order to save it in Russia itself—just as Stalin had built the satellite regimes not for their own sake but as a security for his western frontier. Tactically Gorbachev miscalculated badly—within
In Italy left terrorists emphasized their (illusory) links to the proletariat, but it was right terrorists who posed the greater danger (and killed more people).
‘. . . I found a big stone to throw at a soldier. . . . I’m going to get a gun when I’m a little older . . .’ (Belfast children’s chant, circa 1976).
Europe’s ‘economic miracle’ depended heavily on the contribution of these migrants—and the remittances they sent home.
The division of Germany had been the work of the victors of World War Two and its reunification in 1990 would never have come about without their encouragement or consent.
The first reaction from Paris was to try and block any move to German unification—Mitterrand
The US thus committed itself wholeheartedly to support for Kohl’s objectives, to ensure that Germans were never required to choose between unity and the Western alliance.
Gorbachev tried at first to hold the unification negotiations hostage for a ransom of $20 billion, before finally settling for approximately $8 billion, together with some $2 billion more in interest-free credits. Overall, from 1990 through 1994, Bonn transferred to the Soviet Union (and latterly Russia) the equivalent of $71 billion
The Russian empire had grown by conquest and accretion over the centuries and much of what had once been foreign territory was now intimately associated with the homeland.
In the declining years of the peoples’ republics, patriotism re-emerged as a serviceable substitute for socialism. For just this reason it was also the easiest and least threatening form of political opposition.
The American President’s publicly-aired caution is a further salutary reminder of the limited part played by the USA in these developments.
‘Until the Bosnians, Serbs and Croats decide to stop killing each other, there is nothing the outside world can do about it’.
كالعادة، مساواة الضحية بالجلاد
