The Soviet Union is a stable superpower and the Cold War is the defining, permanent framework of international relations.
The Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991. The rapidity of its collapse surprised virtually every expert. Solidarity in Poland (1980), martial law (1981), and early cracks in the bloc were visible but not recognized as terminal.
What changed?
On December 13, 1981, the Polish government declared martial law. Tanks rolled through Warsaw. Solidarity, the independent trade union movement that had organized ten million Polish workers, was suppressed. Its leader Lech Wałęsa was interned. The military imposed a curfew, suspended civil liberties, and announced that Poland's Communist Party would restore order.
To most analysts at the time, martial law confirmed what they already believed: the Soviet bloc was stable and self-correcting. When dissident movements arose, the system, through its own military or through Soviet pressure, suppressed them. Solidarity had seemed, briefly, like an opening, but the crackdown demonstrated that the underlying structure was intact. Social studies classes in 1981 taught the Cold War as the defining, permanent framework of international relations, and martial law seemed to confirm it.
The reading was not unreasonable given what was visible. The Soviet Union had suppressed the Hungarian uprising in 1956, the Prague Spring in 1968, and was now sponsoring the suppression of Solidarity. The pattern suggested a system capable of defending itself. The economic dysfunction that was quietly corroding the Soviet bloc, the shortages, the failing productivity, the mounting hard-currency debt, was less visible than the tanks.
What martial law actually demonstrated, in retrospect, was that the system could no longer rely on the Communist Party to suppress dissent; it needed the military. Solidarity went underground but did not disappear. Wałęsa received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. The movement continued organizing in the years that followed, sustained by the Catholic Church and by Western support. When Gorbachev's reforms in the late 1980s signaled that Moscow would no longer use force to maintain bloc discipline, Solidarity ran in free elections in 1989 and won a landslide.
Poland was the first domino, the real ones this time. Hungary opened its border with Austria in May 1989. The Berlin Wall fell in November. Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution toppled its government in December. Romania's communist regime collapsed violently that same month. The framework that martial law had appeared to confirm was gone within eight years. The certainty with which the permanence of the Soviet order was taught in 1981 proved to have a very short shelf life.
