CHANGES IN THE SOVIET UNION AND EASTERN EUROPE: SOURCES AND NATURE

This article surveys the cascade of political and economic transformations that unfolded across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s. It identifies the layered sources of change—structural stagnation in centrally planned economies, fiscal crises of the socialist state, information effects triggered by glasnost, and legitimacy shocks from reform expectations outpacing delivery. The discussion highlights the role of transnational linkages, including debt exposure, trade reorientation, and norm diffusion from pan-European institutions. It also traces domestic catalysts: elite splits, opposition organization, and the emergence of mass civic movements that reframed the costs of repression. By disaggregating “nature of change” into reform, rupture, and negotiated transition, the article clarifies why outcomes varied from relatively orderly pacts to sudden regime breakdowns. The argument is that ideas and interests interacted through institutions: reformist frames empowered constituencies, while institutional veto points shaped sequencing, reversals, and long-run constraints on state capacity and market building.

The body begins with a concise political economy of late socialism. Productivity slowdown, technological lag, and soft budget constraints combined to produce chronic shortages and declining living standards. Glasnost widened the discursive space, enabling publics to articulate grievances and elites to test alternative coalitions. Section two analyzes external pressures: oil price volatility undermined hard-currency earnings; COMECON trade patterns proved brittle; Western credit conditionality raised the salience of macroeconomic stabilization. Section three maps transition pathways. In Poland and Hungary, elite bargains created round-table pacts that blended electoral opening with constitutional guardrails; in the GDR and Czechoslovakia, mass mobilization forced rapid turnover with subsequent institutional design struggles; in Romania, regime collapse involved violence with weak initial state capacity. Section four explores the Soviet center, where perestroika loosened command hierarchies without building credible market institutions, amplifying republican sovereignty claims and center–periphery bargaining. Section five distills mechanisms that determined variation: media liberalization lowered coordination costs; security service fragmentation reduced repression credibility; and international guarantees helped lock in new rules. The article closes with implications for comparative transitions: sequencing matters, but so does the fit between policy ambition and administrative capacity. Durable democratization and market development depend on early investments in competition policy, social safety nets, and fiscal federalism that align incentives for compliance and reduce backlash risks.