Mikhail Gorbachev will undoubtedly have an important place in history - how important, and for what accomplishment, remains to be seen.
When Gorbachev came to power over the troubled Soviet Union in 1985, he also inherited an increasingly troubled empire in Eastern Europe. All of the states had serious economic problems. Eastern European products, with a few exceptions, were not very competitive in the West nor in the Third World. Poland, East Germany (the GDR), Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, all had accumulated tremendous foreign debts, and Western governments and banks were very reluctant to extend new credits or even reschedule old ones. Moreover, the six Eastern European states were tied to the Soviet Union in an inefficiently managed, sometimes divisive economic union, the Council for Economic Mutual Assistance (CEMA).
Eastern Europe was tied economically to the USSR in another significant way. Paradoxical as it may seem, the Soviet Union has functioned as an underdeveloped economy in relation to Eastern Europe; it supplied raw materials at artificially low prices in return for industrial and finished products. This situation had ramifications beyond the purely economic, for Soviet citizens could not escape the realization that their politically subordinate allies had generally and sometimes dramatically higher standards of living, and in most cases enjoyed much greater political freedoms. Similarly, the Soviet defense establishment, under mounting pressure from competing domestic economic priorities and increasingly apprehensive over the ability of the Soviet economy to keep up with the technological demands prompted by the Reagan military buildup, probably viewed with dissatisfaction the much lower percentages of national resources devoted to defense by the Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact (NSWP) states.
Problems in paradise
There were other, more enduring problems in the Eastern European empire. Although quietly slumbering since the early 1980s, a volcano of social, political and economic unrest continued to rumble in Poland and could always erupt again with suddenness. A parallel situation existed to one degree or another in the five other satellite states. A small but bonafide pacifist movement had been allowed to develop in the GDR. Access to "subversive" Western media was widespread, especially in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, which both bordered on the West. A few Eastern European communist governments had increasingly adopted semi-independent foreign policy positions and attitudes. Both Berlin and Prague had with open reluctance accepted deployment of new Soviet tactical missiles announced as a response to NATO INF deployments. Romania, resolutely Stalinist at home, had long gone its own way in a number of foreign policy areas.
In sum, CEMA was an imitation of the Western European Economic Community, and the Warsaw Pact's military strength was overwhelmingly more dependent upon the USSR than NATO's was on the United States. Soviet political control over their allies, although still tight (and ultimately decisive on any issue deemed vital by Moscow), had progressively lost much of its pervasiveness, especially in regard to routine matters.
Nevertheless, the Soviets, including Gorbachev, clearly saw the Eastern empire as strategically vital. It provided strategic depth - a buffer from the
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