Historical Events
East Germany · Events 6
The People's Democracies of Eastern Europe
From the summer of 1944, coalition governments with communist participation were formed in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary as the Red Army arrived, in the Soviet zone of Germany, and in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Albania, which had been liberated largely by their own forces. Each country passed through land reform and the nationalisation of major industry. The elections of 1945–46 produced divided results in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, while in Poland and Romania the official counts diverge from records published later. In 1947 the other coalition parties were pushed out through dissolution, splits and trials, and between 1946 and 1948 the social democratic parties were merged into the communist parties. Over the same years "people's democracy" was explained first as a "new road" distinct from the Soviet system and then, in December 1948, redefined as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. By 1949 constitutions and single-list elections had fixed the new order in every country, and trials and purges had begun inside the parties themselves.
The Founding of the Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Pact (formally the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance) was a collective-defense alliance signed on May 14, 1955, in Warsaw by the Soviet Union and seven Eastern European socialist states. The immediate trigger was the October 1954 Paris Agreements, which set West Germany on course for rearmament and NATO membership. The Soviet Union began preparing the alliance at the November 1954 Moscow Conference; the treaty was signed four days after West Germany entered NATO. The preamble identified a remilitarized West Germany in NATO as a threat to peace-loving states, and Article 4 committed signatories to render immediate assistance, including armed force, in the event of armed attack in Europe. Marshal Ivan Konev was named supreme commander, and a Political Consultative Committee was established. Yet the Warsaw Pact was more facade than substance: the USSR already controlled Eastern Europe through bilateral treaties and stationed troops, and Nikita Khrushchev conceived the new organization as a bargaining chip, to be traded for a pan-European collective security system that would also dissolve NATO.
The Building of the Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was a 156-km border fortification built around West Berlin by the East German government starting on 13 August 1961. Between 1949 and 1961, 3.5 million East German citizens fled to West Germany, many through Berlin's open sector boundary. With the exodus of skilled workers and intellectuals pushing the East German economy toward collapse, GDR leader Walter Ulbricht persuaded Nikita Khrushchev to approve closing the border. Formal agreement was reached at a Warsaw Pact meeting in Moscow on 3–5 August 1961, and during the night of 12–13 August some 25,000 East German troops and police sealed all crossing points to West Berlin with barbed wire. The three Western powers declined to intervene militarily because their Four-Power rights in West Berlin were not directly violated; US President John F. Kennedy concluded that 'a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.' The concrete barrier stood for 28 years as the Cold War's defining symbol, and at least 140 people died trying to cross it.
The Prague Spring
The Prague Spring was a reform movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968 led by Alexander Dubček. Its “socialism with a human face” — easing censorship, widening freedom of expression and movement, and economic reform — won broad popular support. But the Soviet Union defined it as a break from the bloc and, in August 1968, occupied Czechoslovakia with the armies of five Warsaw Pact states.
The New Thinking and the End of the Cold War
Gorbachev recast Soviet diplomacy under the New Thinking: nuclear war could have no winner, and security was to be gained with one's adversary, not against them. Gromyko, foreign minister for twenty-eight years, stepped aside for Shevardnadze. Through the Geneva (1985) and Reykjavik (1986) summits came the 1987 INF Treaty, the first abolition of an entire class of nuclear weapons, and in his December 1988 UN address Gorbachev announced a unilateral cut of half a million troops and freedom of choice for all nations. By February 1989 the withdrawal from Afghanistan was complete.
The Revolutions of 1989
In 1989 one-party communist systems fell in quick succession across Eastern Europe. Hungary opened its border, Poland reached free elections through round-table talks, the Berlin Wall came down, and in Romania Ceaușescu was executed. The decisive difference was that Gorbachev, unlike in 1956 and 1968, renounced armed intervention.