Free Winter is Coming by Gary Kasparov

Soviet Bloc succeeded in doing. This left Russia and other former Soviet states vulnerable to the humiliation myth and to men like Putin eager to exploit it.

THE LOST DECADE
    Many today seem to have forgotten that the fall of the Iron Curtain, the end of the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union were distinct events. Closely related events, of course, but by the time the USSR officially disappeared the Berlin Wall had been down for over two years. Anti-Communist revolutions and secessionist movements of various stripes spread across Central and Eastern Europe in 1989, beginning with the Solidarity movement in Poland in April. The wave swept through Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania.
    In my recollection, the Soviet media covered these incredible events with the schizophrenia typical of the glasnost period. In theory, the press was free at this point, but television in particular was still under centralized Kremlin control. Programs that discussed the Baltic uprisings in an insufficiently critical way, for example, could suddenly disappear from the airwaves. It was also in response to these political shifts that a more aggressive form of propaganda began to appear on Soviet television instead of just bland news and light entertainment. The print media had come a long way since the party-line Pravda days before 1985 and periodicals were bold enough to accurately report the fall of one European Communist regime after another. The transformation was remarkably peaceful, with the notable exception of the execution of vile Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who had ordered his troops to fire on anti-government protestors and where an estimated eleven hundred people were killed during the violence.
    China’s Tiananmen Square protests and massacre should also be mentioned in any discussion of “the Spirit of 1989,” especially since Gorbachev visited Beijing in May, right in the middle of the protests, three weeks before the tanks were sent in to crush the demonstrators. Dictators seem to learn from history much better than democrats, by the way. The Putins of this world view Gorbachev as having been too weak to hold the USSR together and take from Tiananmen the value of brutal force.
    Far more blood would soon come from a sadly predictable quarter, Yugoslavia, which, while Communist, had remained officially nonaligned for decades. When dictator-for-life Josip Tito died in 1980, the tight lid he had clamped down on the many ethnic and territorial divisions in the patchwork Balkan nation began to rattle. Federal control was already very weak by the time the European anti-Communist movement arrived and led to the country’s first multiparty elections. But instead of settling things, the elections highlighted the irreconcilable differences among the country’s terribly intertwined republics and its ethnic and religious groups. The ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo was resentful of the Serbs while separatist parties in Slovenia and Croatia promised independence at the same time Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic worked to strengthen the federal system that he largely controlled. It was a recipe for disaster that would soon become the first test of the post-Cold War security system.
    With enough problems already stemming from the 1989 revolutions, NATO and the Western powers were happy to ignore the initial phases of the Yugoslav wars as internal problems. Europe had to figure out how to deal with 130 million impoverished new friends and their fledgling democratic governments. The Bush administration was focused on the USSR and, from August 1990 to February 1991, with the first Gulf War and its aftermath. The US-led coalition to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait was notable for being the first time the two superpowers had been on the same side of a crisis since the end of World War II. The Soviet Union had been Saddam’s main supporter, so the joint US-USSR statement condemning his invasion