Collectively, the Eastern bloc countries slid into an economic crisis with no easy exit, especially not for state-dominated, centrally planned economies. Whereas in 1970 net material production in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had risen by 8 percent on average, average increases dropped to 2.1 percent in 1979. Growth in all sectors shrank to historic lows.796 In the last three years of the Brezhnev era (1979 to 1982), the number of those in work grew by only 1.4 percent, while worker productivity grew by only 2.3 percent and gross capital investment by only 2.2 percent. Shortages developed in two decisive production factors - labor and capital.26 Aging machinery made for high repair costs, while a workforce with little motivation and often insufficient qualifications wasted its time on unproductive endeavors. Even in weapons technology, the Soviet Union was no longer able to compete with the United States. Accidents such as the Chernobyl disaster in April 1986 had immediate and dramatic effects on the supply of goods. The fall in oil prices in the second half of the 1980s also led to a worsening of the foreign trade balance.
In light of the growing communication between East and West, the leaders of the Communist dictatorships were no longer in a position to reassure their populations with promises of a better future. Instead, the frustration over new bottlenecks and numerous sharp reductions in living standards found expression in broad protest movements which immediately called into question the legitimacy of "real existing socialism." In Poland, this had been the case since 1980, and, there, the imposition of martial law had been unable to suppress frustration over the long term. When renewed worker unrest in the spring of 1989 inspired the transition to a multiparty system, a general rejection of the ruling order occurred right across the Eastern bloc; first in Hungary, then in the GDR, and then almost simultaneously in the other satellite states. In the Soviet Union, where halfhearted reforms only served to worsen the supply of goods, dissatisfaction encouraged nationalist movements in all directions. Everywhere in the socialist sphere, frustration with material conditions and embitterment toward the political leadership produced the fundamental delegitimization of the ruling order.797
The leaderships of the Communist parties either sought salvation in reforms which amounted to adoption of the Western societal model, or capitulated when they were rejected by a working class that they had so long claimed to represent. No more illusions could be maintained in light of the standards of societal openness established by the West, the technological revolution in communications, and the reforms instituted by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The peoples of the Eastern bloc liberated themselves from the shackles of a rigid system, sometimes with the cooperation of their leaders, but for the most part at their expense. The people of the GDR, where the Iron Curtain was literally pulled down, quickly voted for annexation into the Federal Republic and the wondrous prosperity of the West that now lay before them.
In retrospect, the implosion of the Soviet bloc was a belated shattering of the illusions and self-deceptions that the leaders of the October Revolution had imposed on post-tsarist Russia, and which thereafter had been believed by generations of Communists the world over. Communist elites nonetheless sought to preserve their leadership role. They failed when a new stage of technological development made apparent to everyone the limited potential of a centrally directed collectivist economy in a strongly interlinked world. The Cold War thus not only had its roots in the conflicts of modern industrial society; it was also made obsolete by the further development of that society.
World History
