As we celebrate the revolutions of 1989 in eastern Europe – the Polish elections in June, the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November, the liberation of the other countries of eastern Europe, the bloody denouement in Romania – we risk ignoring the thing that made them possible: perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev's spectacular revolution in the Soviet Union.
People understood at the time. Adam Michnik, one of the leaders of the Polish anti-Communist opposition, said in July 1989: “Were it not for the ‘perestroika virus', our [democratic movement] could not have got where it is today.”
One can trace the story back to another spectacular but forgotten event: the Polish “spring in October” of 1956, when a group of liberal Communists ousted the Stalinist leadership, threw out the ubiquitous Soviet advisers, including the minister of defence, Marshal Rokossovsky, and warned Khrushchev the Polish army would fight if he sent in the tanks.