In Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire(1) Victor Sebestyen recounts the historic collapse of the communist superpower. Yet none in the USSR, America, Europe, or Vatican imagined how near that event! Let me briefly describe the book and draw important lessons.

From the end of WWII until 1989 the single global power capable of challenging the United States had been the Soviet Union. From WWII until then, Eastern Europe had been cordoned-off. On the opposite side of the Iron Curtain from us stood East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria—essentially, vassal states of the Soviet empire. But epic change was about to occur, and the epicenter of the collapse would be Poland.

Many today have little recollection of these events. But I was alive then. No nuclear-armed superpower had ever before disintegrated but it was about to happen.

Was a there a religious angle in all this? In the Soviet Union, writes Sebestyen,

For the most part, the secret police and their political masters ceased to think they could make people believe in communism. All citizens had to do was pretend they believed, and outwardly conform. It became increasingly a spiritless charade.

In the early 1970s, the Polish regime hushed up the results of a research project conducted by some government economists. It is easy to see why the information was kept a secret. The survey found that the average female Polish worker got up at 5 a.m., spent more than two hours a day traveling to and from work, fifty-three minutes queuing for food, nine hours a day working, an hour and a half a day cooking and on house work and less than six and a half hours a day sleeping. After more than a quarter of a century of Socialism, the system was evidently failing. Unlike most religions, which offered rewards in heaven to come, communism promised earthly relief for miseries here, and now. It was not delivering.(2)

In 1978 Karol Wojtyla was elected pope choosing himself the name John Paul II.

The Catholic world for centuries have been used to elderly Italian popes. Here was a vigorous fifty-eight-year-old, a man, who still looked athletic, a Slav, an inspirational pastor rather than a Curia politician… he had to train as a priest underground during the Nazi occupation…. Now there was a pope who understood communism from first-hand experience, and this worried a man like Yuri Andropov.(3)

With the collapse of oil prices in the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union lost almost half its foreign earnings.(4) Eastern bloc nations spinning toward bankruptcy took out loans from private banks guaranteed by Western governments.(5)

Life in the Soviet sphere differed from that in America. A 1983 law in Romania required every typewriter be registered with the police with a typing sample from each unique machine. Renting or lending a typewriter was forbidden and every typewriter owner had to have authorization from the militia, with that process repeated every years.(6)

Even if you managed to gain possession of a typewriter, there was the phenomenon of self-censorship:

We got so used to this second opinion lurking in our own heads, and we considered it our own. We believed we were writing in freedom, and under our own influence, but we weren’t. That was the most odious aspect of the system—it allowed us to believe we were free, and we wanted to believe [it] too. So we played along with our own oppression.(7)

When you were brought in for questioning in East Germany by the Stasi (secret state police), an extra adhesive layer of foam had been attached to the seat to collect odors. The foam covers were preserved in jars for later use by tracker dogs if someone fled.(8)

The Soviets feared the American Strategic Defense Initiative more popularly known as “Star Wars,” knowing that they could not afford to develop the technology to keep pace.(9) Spending for the Soviet military was already an intolerable 40% of GDP. Gorbachev wanted to shift spending to other things in order to “save socialism in the USSR”(10). The American Strategic Defense Initiative would make that impossible.

The US military held an enormous exercise in November 1983 named “Able Archer.” Unknown to the US, top Soviet leadership had come to believe this was not an exercise but that the US intended to launch a nuclear first strike. The same year, US president Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” and in September the Soviets had shot down Korean 747 passenger flight KAL-007 when it strayed 300 miles off-course into Soviet airspace. It was only in the last days of Able Archer that the US government became aware how nervous the Soviets were and reached out to them to reassure them. President Reagan’s views were changed by how the nations had come to the knife-edge of danger, and he sought more aggressively for peace.(11)

Nineteen-eighty-six saw the explosion of the nuclear reactor near Chernobyl. The scale of that disaster convinced Mikhail Gorbachev nuclear war would be unwinnable.(12) The Soviets were even more deeply embarrassed in 1987 when a 19 year old bank clerk from Germany evaded Soviet air defenses and landed a cessna 172 in Red Square with his 22 page plan to abolish all weapons and end the Cold War.(13)

Adding to this was the debacle in Afghanistan from 1979-1989. The Soviets had occupied the nation in support of a communist government but the war was unpopular and costly. America provided enormous supplies of weaponry to the local insurgency, and without investing enormous additional resources, the Soviets could not win. They finally left Afghanistan.(14)

Sebesteyn notes,

Every intelligence agency, for its own bureaucratic, as well as ideological reasons, has a vested interest in overstating the threat posed by an adversary. Often they tend to base their analyses on the ‘better to be safe than sorry principal.’

Many of the operatives in Langley had a more accurate picture of the chaos and bankruptcy of the [Soviet] system. ‘but even if we knew, we would never have been able to publish it,’ said the CIA’s chief Soviet analyst for two and a half decades, Douglas MacEachin. ‘Had we done so, people would have been calling for my head.’ Heretical views seldom reached the white house, or the upper reaches of the national security council. So the CIA was constantly reporting that the economies of the Soviet Union and some of the satellite states were growing.(15)

In Romania, it was a 37 year old pastor, preaching from Daniel two who set the collapse there in motion. Hated by both the government and by his own church leaders, Pr Tokes, read from the Bible,

To ye, it is commanded, O people, nations, and languages, that at what time you hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of musick, ye fall down and worship the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar the king hath set up: and whoso falleth not down and worship the golden image shall that same hour be cast into the midst of a burning, fiery furnace.(16)

Pr Tokes’ church leaders, having collaborated with the communist regime for decades, took his message to be criticizing Romanian leader Nikolai Ceausescu. Pastor Tokes was repeatedly arrested, interrogated, and beaten for this and other activities. Church leaders sought to fire him from the ministry but he resisted in lengthy court battles. Finally, when he was being evicted from the parsonage, Pr Tokes invited parishioners to witness the event. About 35 church members came, but soon others arrived from across the city, and began protesting the regime.(17) The next day there were thousands and even the town hall had been set afire.

Tokes was arrested, badly beaten, and told that unless he signed a blank paper agreeing to his eviction, his pregnant wife would be violently beaten. Ceausescu set the police to shooting the crowds. Scores were killed and seven hundred arrested. Ceausescu arranged for a mass meeting in which he would speak and demonstrate that the people were still with him. But when the event was held, the crowd began to boo him, and within 48 hours he had been executed and the government overthrown.

And yet, the special point of collapse was Poland.

The pope had visited Poland in 1979 and received an enormous response.(18) The Polish economy was a mess, the nation deep in debt, and in time came to the verge of default on foreign loans. In 1980 and Anna Walentynowycz was a crane operator in the Gdansk shipyard. She had before expressed sympathy for 44 workers who had been murdered by police. After new unrest at the shipyard she was among those fired. Five days later a strike was called. Lech Walesa emerged to lead it, and soon workers across the region had joined the strike and Solidarity.

A parallel society rapidly developed, numerous illegal newspapers were published, and unofficial structures were set up alongside official ones.(19) The pope collaborated privately with Walesa.(20) martial law was declared and most Solidarity leaders arrested. But America’s CIA collaborated with the Vatican channeling 50 million USD to support Solidarity.(21) The economic problems worsened, eventually the party was legalized, elections held, and Solidarity won overwhelmingly and the communist government ended.(22)

In spite of all the pieces on the board, the CIA somehow missed the fact that its main enemy was dying and its empire was withering away. When the impossible happened and the Soviet empire dissolved, American president George Bush was very cautious. Gorbachev had been convinced the Soviet satellite nations would remain allied to the Soviet Union, but they speedily left.

Although Sebestyen’s book doesn’t delve far into it, let’s finish at the religious angle.

The communist idea is really a secular religion. It is faith in the ability of man to be god to other men. The grand other controls the masses for the good of the masses; but really, a self-appointed elite control the masses for the material benefit of the self-appointed elite. It is always true that apart from God we serve ourselves.

Behind the Iron Curtain, church structures had mostly been overcome. “Most of the churches had been suppressed without much of a struggle in the late 1940s and 1950s… with a mixture of brutality, coercion and subversion in most of Eastern Europe the churches had been driven underground, and were not seen as centres of resistance.”(23) But the other interesting piece here is the resiliency and power of the Roman Catholic Church, especially in Poland. I am a Protestant and I see numerous ways that the Roman church is wrong. And yet, I am sure that there are true-hearted believers in every church, and that when there is actual resolve to live the kingdom of God, there can be a para culture, a parallel society, parallel civilization, distinct from all the political boundaries and ideas of men.

The communist government of Poland, and every communist government everywhere, was illegitimate in its determination to be god to men. All such efforts are doomed to fail. In God’s order, no state gets to be god to those in its borders. All human substitutes for God not only fail but inevitably destroy lives and produce poisonous fruit. When man costumes himself as god he destroys not only his own dignity but that of the humans he gods over.

To the extent that not only communist governments but Western governments—even governments which were founded recognizing the human right to liberty—degenerate into authoritarian regimes seeking to be god to men, those governments schedule themselves for their own dissolution.

Revolution 1989 reminds us that governments and movements rise and governments and movements fall. We can be right in the middle of our lives and certain that large changes are decades or centuries away, when actually they are already happening. The ground may be already moving under our feet but in the moment we do not even feel the earthquake.

There is not and never will be a successful replacement for God and His kingdom. Nor is it within the list of possible outcomes that humans will improve themselves or this world on our own apart from God. All we can do is generate dystopias and add evidence that the creature apart from the Creator is only violence seeking violence. The high and mighty always prove themselves low and self-seeking, and God ultimately rules over “the kingdom of men.”(24)

Larry Kirkpatrick serves as pastor of the Muskegon and Fremont MI Seventh-day Adventist churches. His website is GreatControversy.org and YouTube channel is “Larry the guy from Michigan.” Every morning Larry publishes a new devotional video.

Notes

1. Victor Sebestyen, Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, (Random House, 2009, New York), 451 pp.

2. Ibid., p. 16.

3. Ibid., p. 25.

4. Ibid., p. 187.

5. Ibid., pp. 75-77.

6. Ibid., p. 165.

7. Ibid., p. 208.

8. Ibid., pp. 122-123.

9. Ibid., p. 94.

10. Ibid., p. 10.

11. Ibid., pp. 79-89.