By November, the Berlin Wall was pierced.īut there were also deeper causes.
Gorbachev refused to use force to put down demonstrations. But once glasnost let people say what they were thinking, many people said, "We want out." By the summer of 1989, Eastern Europeans were given more degrees of freedom.
To light a fire under the bureaucrats, he used a strategy of glasnost, or open discussion and democratization. When discipline was not enough to solve the problem, he launched the idea of perestroika, or "restructuring," but the bureaucrats kept thwarting his orders. When he first came to power in 1985, Gorbachev tried to discipline the Soviet people as a way to overcome the existing economic stagnation. However, his reform snowballed into a revolution driven from below rather than controlled from above. Gorbachev wanted to reform communism, not replace it. An article by Steven Erlanger in today's New York Times quotes the neo-conservative commentator Robert Kagan as saying that "the standard narrative is Reagan." But the standard narrative is misleading.Ī greater portion of the cause belongs to Mikhail Gorbachev. The end of the Cold War was a greater historical transformation than 9/11, but controversy persists about its causes.
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