Unfortunately for Khrushchev, he was to be tested again the very same month. In October 1956, Hungary decided to rebel. Hungary was led by a hard-line Communist named Rákosi. The people of Hungry hated the restrictions that Rákosi’s Communism imposed on them. They were not pleased about losing their freedom of speech, and lived in fear of the secret police. They didn’t want Soviet troops and officials in their country, yet they had to pay for them to be there.
In June 1956 an opposing group within the communist party of Hungary opposed Rákosi. Feeling the pressure, he asked Moscow for help. Rákosi wanted to arrest 400 leading opponents. Moscow denied him, and the Kremlin had him retire for ‘health reasons’. A man named Ernö Gerö succeeded Rákosi, but he was not more acceptable to the Hungarians. This caused a mass student demonstration on the 23rd October, when the giant statue of Stalin in Budapest was pulled down.
Khrushchev let a new Hungarian government to be formed under Imre Nagy. He withdrew the troops and tanks from Hungary. The Hungarians created thousands of local councils to replace soviet power.
Nagy’s new government decided it would hold free elections, create impartial courts and restore farmland to its private owners. It wanted complete withdrawal of the Soviet army from Hungary and wanted to leave the Warsaw Pact. The people of Hungary were optimistic that the new US president, Eisenhower would support the new, independent Hungary.
Even though Khrushchev could at first agree with some of the reforms, he could not let Hungary leave the Warsaw Pact. In November 1956, Soviet troops and tanks moved back into Budapest. The Hungarians did not give in, and two weeks of bitter fighting followed. A lot of Hungarians were killed, a lot more Hungarians fled across the border to Austria to escape the Communist forces. Imre Nagy and his fellow leaders were imprisoned and executed. The Hungarian resistance was crushed in two weeks. The west protested this, but did not send help. Kádár was now in charge of Hungary as appointed by Khrushchev. Kádár did slowly introduce some of the requested reforms, however he would not leave the Warsaw Pact.
In 1968, twelve years after the Hungarian Uprising, Czechoslovakia posed a similar threat to the USSR. A new leader, Leonid Brezhnev, had replaced Khrushchev. The people of Czechoslovakia had seen what had happened in 20 years of communism and they didn’t like it. When the old, Stalinist leader was forced to resign, Alexander Dubček became the leader of the Czech communist party. He proposed a policy of less censorship, more freedom of speech and a reduction on the activities of the secret police. Was there opposition is Czechoslovakia because people were scared of change? Or was it because the economy was in a bad way and there were problems with the living conditions?
People who believed that the communists had not led the country forward led the Czech opposition. Seeing as censorship had been eased, they were able to launch attacks on the Communist leaders, saying that they were corrupt and useless. This period of time became known as the Prague Spring, because of all the new ideas that were around. By the summer there was talk of allowing another political party, the Social Democratic party to be set up as a rival to the communist party.
The USSR was suspicious of these changes. Czechoslovakia was a very important part of the Warsaw Pact. The soviets did not want the ideas in Czechoslovakia spreading into other countries in Eastern Europe. The USSR tried various methods in response. They tried to slow Dubček down, arguing with him and getting Soviet, Polish and East German troops to perform very public training exercises on the Czech border.
In July, it was decided that there would be no Social Democratic Party, however, Dubček insisted on keeping most of his reforms. The tension eased. It was agreed at a Warsaw Pact meeting in early August that Czechoslovakia should maintain political stability. 17 days later, soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia. There was little violent resistance to this, but many Czech people disagreed to cooperate with the soviet troops. Dubček was removed from power. Brezhnev was still worried about Dubček’s ideas spreading. In 1968, Albania resigned from the Warsaw Pact because it thought that the Soviet Union had become to liberal. Brezhnev did not consider Albania to be an important country; therefore he did nothing to stop them.
Brezhnev decided to make rules. The essentials of communism were defined as a one party system and they must be part of the Warsaw Pact. Before the invasion of soviet tanks in Czechoslovakia, people were optimistic there; afterwards people that had been pro soviet were now resentful.
The Czechoslovakian uprising resulted in the Brezhnev doctrine – expressing that the USSR would reserve the right to intervene rule in any state within the Soviet Bloc in order to preserve a communist political system. The fact that the Soviet Union, and more specifically Russia, was imposing its power on the nations within its sphere of influence did not help it to become a popular ally of these much smaller countries. The subsequent hatred of the communist system and of those enforced its existence were enough to eventually topple the satellite state system and eventually the Soviet Union itself. Solidarity in Poland provides another excellent example of the Soviet satellite states’ objection to being members of the USSR. Hatred for the Soviet system and the resentment of the fact that communism was forced upon them was another were the reasons for the satellite states opposition to membership in the Soviet Empire. This hatred and resentment led to the deterioration of the satellite state system.
In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev because leader of the Soviet Union. However, Communism and the USSR was in crisis, it had become obvious that members of the communist governments often lived in luxury and had goods that were inaccessible to working families, this completely defied communisms policy of equality.
The people of the USSR no longer had faith in communism. They did not believe the promises that their governments had made, and bitterly resented the lack of good quality consumer goods available in their countries, when the west seemed to have more and be richer.
Industry and agriculture were not performing efficiently. Most of the goods that came out of factories didn’t work because their quality was so poor.
The people of the USSR were annoyed because they were living in poverty, whilst the government was spending huge sums of money of weapons.
Gorbachev proposed that a process of ‘perestroika’ should improve the economy; he included some of the practises that made capitalism successful in this process. To restore faith in the government, and to end corruption, Gorbachev suggested there should be more ‘glasnost’, which meant more freedom of speech. He also decided that there should be a cutback in the money spent on arms and defence. He wanted to drop the Brezhnev doctrine and he didn’t want to spend as much money on other countries’ affairs. This all happened very quickly, and by the end of 1988 it was clear that communist governments in eastern Europe had to be responsible for their own policies and could not expect support from the Soviet army. From that moment, the days of Communist government in Eastern Europe were numbered. The decision to abandon the Brezhnev Doctrine and withdraw support from other communist countries was very dangerous. If the countries in the Warsaw Pact chose to abandon communism, who would defend the Soviet Union? This is exactly what happened, during the summer of 1989 one by one, the communist governments in Eastern Europe came to an end. In June 1989 Solidarity got the open elections that they had been demanding for years. Solidarity won nearly all of the seats it contested. Tadeusz Mazowieki, a solidarity leader, became prime minister. In 1990, the first non-communist President of Poland, Lech Walesa was elected.
In November, 1989, East Germany, one of the last hard-line Communist countries, saw the virtual disintegration of its Communist party in the face of economic chaos and revelations of party corruption. The new East German government began dismantling the Berlin wall, the very symbol of the Cold War, and less than a year later, the two Germanys were finally reunited. By the end of 1989, not only Germany had seen a revolution, but Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria had also disposed of their Communist governments.
During the Brezhnev and Gorbachev years, the ideology behind Communism had a different meaning in comparison to earlier times. Wherever the faithful looked, the traditional prophecies had failed to come through: world revolution had not occurred, crime had not vanished, nationalism and religion had not disappeared with the passing of capitalism, as had been predicted. This disillusionment and belief that Communism didn’t fulfil its promises to the people jumped to new highs when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power during the late 1980’s. His liberalised style of leadership allowed people express their views and generally the people of the Soviet Union felt wrong done by the ideology which they had be ensured would see the Soviet Union rise as the most powerful nation in the world. The Soviet system was not suited to the ideology on which the regime was based. This ideology turned out to be inappropriate to the end of the twentieth century. As technology changed and as society was transformed, the superstructure – that is, the form of state and its ideology – became a hindrance to further development. This hindrance became a burden on the society the economy and the system.
