Roderick Braithwaite. Gorbachev was key in freeing Eastern Europe

As we celebrate the revolutions of 1989 in eastern Europe – the Polish elections in June, the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November, the liberation of the other countries of eastern Europe, the bloody denouement in Romania – we risk ignoring the thing that made them possible: perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev’s spectacular revolution in the Soviet Union.

People understood at the time. Adam Michnik, one of the leaders of the Polish anti-Communist opposition, said in July 1989: “Were it not for the ‘perestroika virus’, our [democratic movement] could not have got where it is today.”

One can trace the story back to another spectacular but forgotten event: the Polish “spring in October” of 1956, when a group of liberal Communists ousted the Stalinist leadership, threw out the ubiquitous Soviet advisers, including the minister of defence, Marshal Rokossovsky, and warned Khrushchev the Polish army would fight if he sent in the tanks.

For a while the Polish experiment was a beacon of comparative freedom in the Communist world. But it petered out in the next few years as Brezhnev took a grip in Moscow.

Immediately after he was elected General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in March 1985, Gorbachev made it clear the Soviet political system would have to change radically if the country were to avoid decline. In January 1987 he said there would be secret ballots and more than one candidate for each post. In summer 1988 he announced the same principles would apply to national elections to the Soviet parliament.

The elections took place in March 1989. The party bosses of Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, nearly a quarter of the powerful regional party secretaries, and most of the generals who previously had guaranteed seats, were ousted. The sessions of the new parliament were televised live. People all over the Soviet Union – and in the outside world – stopped work to watch Soviet leaders, including Gorbachev himself, being lambasted, the army and the KGB attacked for their brutality, and votes taken whose outcome was entirely unpredictable.

It may not have been fully-fledged democracy, but it was wildly exhilarating; and it was much closer to the real thing than anything else that had yet happened in a communist country. Massive popular demonstrations in Moscow forced the Communist Party to relinquish its constitutional monopoly of power in 1990, and frustrated conservatives’ attempts to restore the old Soviet Union in 1991. The change for which Polish liberals had been waiting since 1956 had come.

Gorbachev had already told the Warsaw Pact leaders in October 1985 that each ruling party must now take responsibility for its own affairs. In 1986 he told them the methods used in Hungary and Czechoslovakia would no longer work. They were not convinced, and he rather spoiled the picture when he failed to repudiate the 1968 intervention during a visit to Prague in April 1987.

But by now the anti-Communist union Solidarity, suppressed by General Jaruzelski under martial law in 1980, was beginning to reassert itself. The Polish Communists knew they would have to compromise. In September 1988 they sent one of their senior people to talk to Gorbachev. He answered that it was up to the Polish leadership to decide on their own tactics and take their own decisions.

Round table negotiations between the Polish government and Solidarity followed, and were completed in April 1989. Solidarity’s election victory in June was a stunning event. It was followed by irresistible popular pressure for change right across eastern Europe. But by then the Soviet elections had already shown the way.

Many westerners now criticise Gorbachev for failing to manage the whirlwind and most Russians regard him as the traitor who destroyed a superpower. Their country remains introverted, nationalistic, distrusted by its neighbours, unsure of itself and its place in the world. Its history, size and poverty meant it never had much chance of making the comparatively rapid and easy transition to democracy achieved in the rest of Europe.

If the country ever overcomes its phobias, future Russian historians will interpret Gorbachev’s role more kindly. The rest of us have little excuse for forgetting that, but for him, the ending of communism in Europe could have been a much more bloody and protracted affair.

Financial Times // 05.11.2009