No matter how clear we try to make it, looking back at 1989 is always a bit like peering into a kaleidoscope. Everything happened so quickly that the participants, from policymakers in Washington to Germans in the streets and Soviet apparatchiks, could barely keep up as the world they knew came crashing down. The end of communism in Europe, on some level at least, makes sense: the Soviets had bankrupted themselves, and their client states throughout Eastern Europe predicted a better future with the West. But if Moscow had wanted, it might have been able to thwart that path of history; instead, it simply allowed the march of freedom that everybody rushed to call inexorable. In fact, the West didn't win the Cold War so much as the East lost it.
Without the benefit of hindsight, though, events unfolded so rapidly that it was almost impossible to keep tabs on the blur. Take just one day, June 4. Solidarity, the political opposition movement in Poland that had been gathering steam for years, made a run at nationwide elections. (The communists had foolishly let them do so.) Though Solidarity toppled the old regime's three-legged throne, Washington was simultaneously blindsided with more earth-shattering news. On the very same day, another communist regime flexed its muscle, slaughtering pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square. And as if China's crackdown weren't enough to crowd Washington's bandwidth, news also broke that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian revolution and archenemy of the U.S., had died. In the first half of 1989, Poland became a blip.
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