wever, Marxist political control continued, albeit under Tito's direction as opposed to that of Moscow. Poland rebelled politically against Soviet control on a number of occasions. In the 1980s, the Poles were finally successful in shedding Marxist political control. Their subsequent attempts at economic reform, however, were often spectacular for their failure. Some East Germans also attempted to revolt against Marxist political control. The efforts were never successful against the East German government. The East Germans, however, were successful in making their Marxist economy work better than any of the other East European Marxist economies.
It was the ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev to the Soviet leadership in 1985, however, that ushered in the most dramatic political and economic changes in Eastern Europe since the Russian Revolution in 1917. Gorbachev assumed office with an agenda calling for a liberalization of the Soviet political structure, a reform of the Soviet economic structure, and a policy of self-determination for the Soviet satellite nation states (Gorbachev, 1987, pp. 24, 76, 113). Fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon one's perspective, Gorbachev initiated his reformist policies before establishing new structures to manage and control the pace and direction of the reforms. As a consequence, the reforms soon went out of control on all fronts--political, economic, and the satellite nation states. In turn, Marxist political and economic control collapsed all across Eastern Europe beginning in 1989, and the Soviet satellite empire in Eastern Europe disintegrated along with the Marxist collapse.
The Environment Within Which Economic and Political Change Occurred in Czechoslovakia and Poland
The economic and political initiatives in Czechoslovakia and Poland over the years from 1945 through 1988, together with those of Gorbachev in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s w...