revolutions of 1989

Popular uprisings in many countries of Eastern Europe against communist rule, prompted by internal reforms in the USSR that permitted dissent within its sphere of influence. By 1990 nearly all the Warsaw Pact countries had moved from one-party to pluralist political systems, in most cases peacefully but with growing hostility between various nationalist and ethnic groups.

Until the late 1980s, any discontent, however widespread, had been kept in check by the use or threat of military force controlled from Moscow. Mikhail Gorbachev's official encouragement of perestroika (radical restructuring) and glasnost (greater political openness), largely for economic reasons, allowed popular discontent to boil over. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1989 the Eastern European states broke away from the communist bloc, as the Soviet republics were to do during the next two years. Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary achieved bloodless coups; Poland held free elections; East Germany took the first steps towards reunification with West Germany; Romania's revolution was short and bloody. Yugoslavia held multiparty elections in 1990 but then broke up into civil war. Albania held elections in 1991.