available to USSR. In the middle of the 1980s about one third of the total GDP was going to the military. In order to maintain a parity with the US, in the context of President Reagan’s Star Wars programme, it became necessary for the Soviet Union to allocate more funds to the military. The increase in military budget further strained the Soviet economy.
The year saw the first mass protests –first in Armenia, and then in the Baltic States. Earlier Soviet regimes had used severe repression to quell such uprisings. Gorbachev could not take recourse to such brutal measures. The Chernobyl Disaster, a major accident in a nuclear plant in Ukraine, in , was another blow.
Gorbachev made moves to stabilise his position by reliance on conservative forces in and . But on each occasion he was interrupted by massive miners’ strike which came close to cripple the country’s energy supplies. The East European communist states, under the Soviet umbrella, were also in a deep economic and social crisis. Gorbachev’s decision to loosen the Soviet control on the countries of Eastern Europe created an independent, democratic momentum.
A series of workers’ strikes undermined the communist regimes first in Poland and then in Hungary. A wave of demonstrations that swept East Germany Perestroika (‘restructuring’) refers to the programme introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s to restructure Soviet economic and political system. Along with the policy of ‘Glasnost’ (‘openness), Perestroika was intended to energize Soviet economy which was lagging behind the developed countries of the capitalist world. Glasnost (‘openness’) was a policy of ideologically openness introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev along with Perestroika in the 1980s.
Under Glasnost there was more openness, writers who had been censored earlier were rehabilitated, and there was space for criticism of politics and government. The World After World War II led to demolition of the Berlin Wall in . Subsequent to it, regimes in Czechoslovakia, followed by Bulgaria, fell. An attempt by Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu to resist the wave of change by