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The strength of history as a study of causality is that it can find causes while knowing the consequences of an event, but its strengths are also weaknesses. The problem is that all the results are inevitable, knowing the result and finding the cause, and it is often impossible to detect the place where the incident occurred and the situation at that time more vividly. It is a trap of retrospective perspective that historians should always be careful about. To examine the collapse of Real socialism at the end of the 20th century, we must escape from retrospective perspective. If the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on December 26, 1991 was a simple and inevitable event, many people would have predicted the event. But it wasn’t.

Picture taken in May 1988 near main gate of Warsaw University

during polish students' demonstration. ⓒRafał Werbanowski

<The sudden collapse of the Impregnable Regime>

“I’ve never thought that something could change in the Soviet Union, let alone the idea that it would disappear. No one expected it. There was a complete impression that everything would last forever.”

This is what Alexei Yurchak, who was born and raised in the Soviet Union, said through his book 『Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation』, thinking about the past. Few expected the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Even though real socialism was contradictory, it seemed to be a solid and stable system at the time. This was not strange.

There's a reminder: Eric Hobsbawm, a great 20th-century historian who died in 2012. When he visited Korea in May 1987, the writer, who was an undergraduate who decided to study history, went to the place where Hobsbawm was giving a lecture. After he finished his lecture, he was asked how to expect the future of the Soviet Union, and I vividly remember how he replied, There is little possibility of collapse because the Soviet Union is a very stable system. Four and a half years later, I was a soldier and entered the Home Office, and the title of the front page of Kookbang Ilbo, which says "Soviet Dismissal," was noticeable. At that moment, I thought, 'Can the newspaper send such a wrong article?' But it wasn’t an misinformation. Hobsbawm's keen insight, which was adored by the new historian, did not work to see the future, not the past of mankind. Hobsbawm, an outside observer, was thinking like that, not to mention the Yurchak inside.

The Russian Revolution, which seemed to be eternal but was the origin of the Soviet system that collapsed at once, was no different. A writer who majored in Russian revolutionary history has also considered the upheaval in Russia in 1917 as inevitable and has long studied the cause. But people of the time did not detect the upheaval at all. It was only a few months before the Russian autocracy was torn down. Even Vladimir Lenin, who was in exile in Switzerland, complained to junior revolutionaries, saying, "I will not be able to experience revolution when I am alive." Who knew that, less than a year before that, Lenin would go back to Russia and lead the October 1917 Revolution that shook the world?

At this point, it is safe to say that the system collapses quickly without notice is a tendency or pattern in Russian history. Even if the cataclysm of history does not allow predictions, there were many signs before that. Just before the Soviet Union, the successor to the communist system that led the world against the United States in the Cold War era, was disintegrated, several socialist countries in Eastern Europe underwent turbulent changes like fever.

<The Wind of Change in Eastern Europe>

I follow the Moskva down to Gorky Park
Listening to the wind of change
An August summer night, soldiers are passing by
Listening to the wind of change…
The wind of change blows straight into the face of time
Like a stormwind that will ring the freedom bell

It is the lyrics of the ‘Wind of Change’ released by German rock band Scorpions in January 1991. This song, which has become a huge hit all over the world, reflects the changes that have occurred at the end of the Cold War, which has been world-class for nearly 40 years. The song, which has become hugely popular around the world, reflects changes that have occurred at the end of the Cold War that have strained the world for nearly 40 years, not just a mouthful tribute. It was inspired by participating in The Moscow Music Peace Festival held in the Soviet capital, called ‘The Land of the East’, on August 12-13, 1989. The artist Scorpions seems to have felt the energy of change before anyone else.

Indeed, there was a very strong wind of change in Eastern Europe. In May 1989, a large hole was opened in the so-called ‘Iron Curtain’ as it was allowed to come and go between the Hungarian People's Republic and Austria, which belongs to the capitalist camp. Knowing this, citizens of the German Democratic Republic(East Germany) went to Hungary, a socialist brother country, from late summer 1989, and went through Austria to the Federal Republic of Germany(West Germany), a country of reactionary and a forbidden land. And in November, after the Berlin Wall, the symbol of the Cold War, collapsed, it was possible to cross West Berlin and East Berlin without any restraint.
Meanwhile, the Velvet Revolution took place in Czechoslovakia, which had been in the long winter since the Prague Spring in 1968. And in December 1989, the playwright and dissident Václav Havel was elected president. In Poland, Solidarity movement led by Lech Walesa overcame the Communist Party’s repression and gained public sentiment, and Walesa became president in 1990. A storm blew in Romania, which had blocked the breath of the people due to extreme tyranny that would surpass the Stalin regime. Nicolae Ceausescu, who had been wielding iron fists, was killed in December 1989 when he was overthrown by a popular uprising.

Stamps showing the revolutionary process of Czechoslovakia and Romania

ⓒOleg Golovnev / Shutterstock.com

ⓒneftali / Shutterstock.com

<The status of Eastern Europe in history>

The signs of a cataclysm in which real socialism collapsed as the Soviet Union was dissolved were seen from a series of turbulent beginnings in Eastern Europe. However, it is easy to be criticized that regarding the change of the Eastern European system as a sign of upheaval in the Soviet Union Is interpreted only as Soviet/Russia. This is a prejudice that comes from the view that Eastern European countries are not considered independent, but only as variables subordinate to the Soviet/Russia. Of course, Eastern Europe and Soviet/Russia were interacting, so we can’t think of them apart, but Eastern Europe has always been out of focus. The perception that Eastern Europe is a satellite state should have been limited to the Cold War, which is at most 40 years old. However, it is true that it has not escaped from the twisted image created by projection into the long Eastern European history.

The image of Eastern Europe is not clear even for the writer who majored in European history. Once, I prepared my new lecture and examined the history of Eastern Europe in detail. In the case of Western Europe, the position of the city as well as the state comes to mind, and in the case of Eastern Europe, I was surprised to realize that the position of the state was confused. Eastern Europe is strange, but it is as important as Western Europe. Eastern Europe has a strong image of being behind Western Europe, but the situation before modern times is different. In the period when the center of the West was the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe belonged to the Eastern Roman Empire with the power and culture that overwhelmed the emerging empire of the Western Empire, so it was able to absorb and develop the vitality of the Eastern Mediterranean. But in modern times, the pulsation of Eastern Europe slowed as the center of the economy shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and in the eighteenth century it fell to the semi-periphery or peripheral part of Western Europe.

In fact, Eastern Europe has long been encroached by Germanic peoples. In 1242, a Slavic man led by Aleksandr Nevskij of Novgorod defeated the Teutonic Order in a battle on the ice of Lake Peipus, preventing the Germans. However, the case suggests that the origin of The Western version of ‘The Eastern Penetration of Western Powers’ is around 800 years old. The Germans, who permeated Eastern Europe, encompassed locals, sometimes suppressed and embraced the top of the pile of society. For this reason, Eastern European nobles often had German surnames.

Because of the entanglement and complexity of ethnic and class, in Eastern Europe in the late 19th century, ‘nation’ began to be defined based on race and religion, not human rights and institutions. Thus, Eastern European nationalism has become an element of volatile and explosive disputes. It is no coincidence that the space where the most horrific atrocities were committed in World War I and World War II in the first half of the 20th century was Eastern Europe.

<Past and Future of Eastern Europe>

The source of the troubles and turbulence in Eastern Europe between the late 1980s and early 1990s is in World War II. In Korea, World War II usually recalls the east asian(Pacific) front and the western front of Europe, but the main stage of this huge war was the eastern front of Europe where Germany and the Soviet Union clashed. Joseph Stalin was on the verge of being taken away to Moscow in November 1941. But he overtook the expectations of almost all the world and defeated Hitler in April 1945 to win the perfect victory. the World War II, especially German-Soviet War, changed the fate of Eastern Europe. As the Red Army advanced eastward, burning vengeance on the Germans, all Germans in Eastern Europe fled to the west in fear. They knew that Nazi Germany had committed cruel atrocities against the Soviet people over the past three years. In the process, the Germanic element that had been rooted in Eastern Europe for eight centuries was violently, but cleanly disappeared in less than eight months. And the ethnic composition of Eastern Europe except for Balkan Pen. has become simple. This is an important result of World War II, which is not well known in Korea.

But it was not the nation-state of Eastern Europe that would leap on the basis of a concise ethnic composition, but the influence of Russia that filled the vacuum that occurred in the place where the Germans escaped. Russia had experience of being defeated by Napoleon of France in 1812 and Hitler of Germany in 1941. Because of this, they have an indelible trauma, and they have an obsession to make Eastern Europe a buffer zone to prevent European Western invasion. As a result, the Soviet Union made it a satellite for its own security, rather than respecting the sovereignty of the national-state of Eastern Europe. The Eastern European socialist system, which Russia has forced to push Germany out and enter the place, can not withstand the load and is destroyed by the wind of change.

But the irony is that it is the German-led European Union that fills the vacuums in Eastern Europe caused by the fall of the Soviet Union. The Western version of ‘The Eastern Penetration of Western Powers’ is affecting Ukraine, which is why Russia feels extreme fear. A few years ago, the collision between Ukraine and Russia over the independence of the Crimean Peninsula was a tragedy that was created by the extension of this situation. The direction of the wind of change in Eastern Europe is changing from west to east and from east to west with a time difference. The direction of ‘the wind of change’ in Eastern Europe is changing from west to east and from east to west with a time difference. We must keep an eye on whether Eastern Europe will shake like grass every time the wind changes, or if it will stand up and grow into a heavy tree.