Rise of the Soviet Satellites

[erpowers]

Can anyone tell me when the Soviet Satellites began to declare their freedom. Did it start right after the fall of the Berlin Wall and continue or did it start later.

[SteppingRazor]

1. It happened before, during and after.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was a highlight of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, but it was neither the beginning nor the end. By Nov. 9, 1989, when the wall came down, a non-communist government had been in power in Poland for several months.

[JHB]

2. What SteppingRazor said!

There'd been a huge increase in people crossing the borders, mostly from Hungary or Czecheslovakia to Austria. After some months of this growing, the East Berliners went at The Wall itself. Thew only thing that could have stopped them would have been a massacre, but by then the will for something like that just wasn't there (at least not in the people who could have ordered one).

[tkmorris]

3. I was envisioning Sputnik getting uppity

Sorry, I didn't get a lot of sleep.

[Fovea]

4. Different members did it in different ways.

Hungary openly invited the post Stalinist Soviet backlash and got it.

Yugoslavia and East Germany resisted by being more socialist than thou to the Russians. Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia alternated between the two. As did Georgia and Ukraine.

Finally, Poland broke the back of the Soviets to enforce Russo Centrism.
This movement, which is a pan nationalism which seems impervious to political philosophy, persists with Chechnya.

[Crunchy Frog]

5. The Eastern bloc, Warsaw Pact states all threw off their communist regimes

and gained their independence over the course of 1989. The states that were actually Soviet republics (like Estonia, Georgia, etc) developed powerful independence movements in 1988 and asserted themselves more and more over the ensuing years. It wasn't until the collapse of the coupe attempt and subsequent collapse of the Soviet state in 1991 that these countries officially gained their independence.

I'm pretty well versed in this entire history, if you want more specific information.