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In this paper I elaborate on and revisit the main ideas I put forward in my introduction to Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., The Revolutions of 1989 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999) as well as in my Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (New York: Free Press, 1992; revised and expanded paperback, with new afterword, Free Press, 1993). Thanks to Bogdan Cristian Iacob and Mark Moll for editorial assistance with the manuscript.
The revolutions of 1989 were, no matter how one judges their nature, a true world-historical event, in the Hegelian sense: they established a historical cleavage (only to some extent conventional) between the world before and after '89. During that year, what appeared to be an immutable, ostensibly indestructible system collapsed with breathtaking alacrity. And this happened not because of external blows (although external pressure did matter), as in the case of Nazi Germany, but as a consequence of the development of insuperable inner tensions. The Leninist systems were terminally sick, and the disease affected first and foremost their capacity for self-regeneration. After decades of toying with the ideas of intra-systemic reforms ('institutional amphibiousness', as it were, to use X. L. Ding's concept, as developed by Archie Brown in his writings on Gorbachev and Gorbachevism), it had become clear that communism did not have the resources for readjustment and that the solution lay not within but outside, and even against, the existing order. 1
The demise (implosion) of the Soviet Union, consummated before the incredulous eyes of the world in December 1991, was directly and intimately related to the previous dissolution of the east European 'outer empire' provoked by the revolutions of 1989. It is now obvious that the historical cycle inaugurated by the First World War, the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in October 1917 and the long European ideological warfare (or rather a global civil war) that followed had come to an end. 2 The importance of these revolutions cannot therefore be overestimated: they represent the triumph of civic dignity and political morality over ideological monism, bureaucratic cynicism and police dictatorship.3 Rooted in an individualistic concept of freedom, programmatically sceptical of all ideological blueprints for social engineering, these revolutions were, at least...