revolutions were remarkable for their lack of violence and their unexpectedness. The powerful regimes of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe appeared to collapse quietly overnight. The former Soviet Union did have deep pockets of regional poverty and a standard of living much lower than the per capita production figures would indicate. However, despite that, the Soviet Union was still a world economic and technological power when the government failed.
Likewise, no Eastern European country had famine or subsistence economies. On a world scale, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany had rich, well-developed economies, not poor ones. In his study of the Eastern European revolutions of 1989, Daniel Chirot found that the investment and production decisions in communist countries were based largely on political rather than domestic or international market pressures. In their efforts to curtail the power of market forces, the communist regimes created conditions in which measurements of what firms were profitable and what production process were efficient were impossible. No real prices existed. The system was impossible to reform because the managers were so closely tied to the ruling political machinery that they were able to lobby effectively to steer investments to their districts, regardless of the efficiency or profit level of their operations. Although the economic disaster contributed to the destruction of the communist state, the changing moral and political climate of Eastern Europe really destroyed communism, according to Chirot (Goldstone 170).
Never in history had an advanced industrial countr
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