Remembering the Collapse of Communism

yep. i try and think back to that too. i remember having discussions with my teacher in elementary school about the probabilities of nuclear holocaust, and our surprise (via scholastic news) that kids in the "eastern bloc" judged the likelihood lower that my own class. was that even for real???

Sigh, no it isn't.

Millions and millions of people live in oppressive, socialist regimes in the middle east.

The scale might be a bit smaller, but its a very similar problem to the cold war and eastern europe, and how things were then.

But now Obama is reinstating that threat with his health care reform!

(Sorry, could not resist.)

I was driving with my wife when the tanks were firing into the Russian white house. I said at the time "this could be very bad or very good."

Fortunately it turned out good.

It could have been very bad.

I did a postdoc in Washington, DC in 1985-87. "Captive Nations Day" was an annual event back then, when Polish-Americans, Slovak-Americans etc. would come to Washington and demonstrate, and give speeches about the day when Eastern Europe would be free. What I remember most was the dripping contempt of the coverage -- what there was -- in the local media, including particularly the Washington Post.

Kielbasa-eating yokels 1, Modern Enlightened Thought 0.

I am from Chile and, at that time, we were a few months away from the end of Pinochet's government and free elections. There was still concern that socialists and communists would influence the next governments and maybe one day come back (Pinochet had kicked them out). So we were relieved when the wall fell and realized they would become small marginal groups.

(Yes, we have had "socialists" presidents since then, but even them are more pro-free market than any mainstream politician in the US; they even privatized the highways and airports!).

I was 16 years old in 1989, growing up in a remote part of northern Scotland. It seemed like I spent that whole autumn glued to the TV watching the news; every day it seemed brought a literally revolutionary development. I experienced it all at second hand, but it still seemed incredibly exciting, I can only imagine the mixture of excitement and fear those East Germans, Czechs, Poles, and others must have felt as they dared to stand up to their oppressors. I remember the night the wall fell, I was watch the BBC's nightly news show Newsnight, the programme was coming from a studio in West Berlin that night and there was some panel discussion taking place about what might happen, when one of the reporters literally burst into the studio and thumped a brick down on the table and declared "that is a brick from the Berlin Wall!". Now that is a TV moment. It still brings tears to my eyes as I remember it.

I remember when Reagan said that Communism was headed for the dustbin of history. I thought, this will never happen. In fact, I told a friend that my beloved Chicago Cubs would win the World Series before Eastern Europe was liberated. HOW WRONG I WAS!

P.S. Thank you, Bryan, and keep it up. My students, most of whom are under 20, have little knowledge of the horrors of Communism.

I remember watching the Tiananmen demonstrations all weekend, I was all excited that the Chinese would be free and maybe then other countries would follow. Major bummer, but at least Eastern Europe turned out well.

Thank you, Bryan for reminding us. There are many historical events that we should not forget, like the Holocaust. European communism and its fall should be remembered. The real winners of the Cold War are the Czechs, Slovaks, East Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Hungarians, Romanians and Bulgarians.

Sorry things didn't turn out so well for the folks in the former Yugoslavia, Albania, Georgia, et cetera.

Bryan~

What is tragic about that happy era is that the socialist calculation=impossible=communist failure isn't in the historiography of the Fall.

See for example Tony Judt's recent tome, a history of Europe. All the events are there, but not the underlying cause!

I complained during the 1990s to libertarian historian's that the battle wasn't over until and unless the complete accounting of the causes of communism's Fall entered the history books. It hasn't, and so with Obama, we don't remember - to out enormous collective cost.

Marx's history repeats - first as farce, then tragedy?