STOCKHOLM, Sweden — This month marks 30 years since Europe — and human civilization generally — began to undergo a miraculous transformation that is now etched in the world’s memory.
Born in terror, the Soviet Union had been sustained by jackboots and secret police. Nobody knew if it could survive without resorting to brute force once again. It was a nervous time for Europe.Efforts to suppress Poland’s independent trade union, Solidarity , had failed. Forced to compromise, the Polish communist regime held semi-free elections in June 1989, in which Solidarity won all but one of the freely contested seats.
But the central, potentially explosive arena in 1989 was the so-called German Democratic Republic — that is, communist East Germany. This was essentially a garrison state, built for the protection of five Soviet armies — spanning 19 divisions and comprising 500,000 soldiers — that had been stationed there ever since 1945.
In the Kremlin, the Soviet leadership — or Gorbachev, at least — continued to believe that the empire was safe and could be reformed. The Baltic Way was tolerated, and the Pan-European Picnic was simply ignored.
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