Why did opposition movements begin to emerge across the Eastern European regimes during the 1970s and 1980s?

Hi, thanks for your question!

Although it is important to remember that the conditions and circumstances varied within each country of the Warsaw Pact, I think historians have pointed to a number of common factors that played a role in all Warsaw Pact countries that contributed to this phenomenon.

It must also be stressed that before the 1970's there had also been opposition groups within Eastern Europe, but these tended to be underground resistance groups, with little visibility and they were simply not effective.

By the 1970's, all Communist regimes in Eastern Europe began to experience increased economic stagnation. Although declining economic growth had already set in during the 1960's, most reform attempts had been abbandoned after 1968 (the Kosygin reforms for example), leading to growing shortages in consumer and luxury products, and increased corruption on the part of bureaucrats and Communist apparatchiks. Meanwhile military expenditures continued to expand in a bid to keep up with NATO. This economic stagnation became especially noticable to the general population by the late 1970's and early 1980's, and not a small role in that was played by the trade relations with the West - I will touch upon that later.

A second major factor to contribute to discontent was that the 1956 Hungarian invasion and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia shattered what little political legitimacy the communist regimes had. In the eyes of the general public, the communist regimes were semi-colonial: headed by exiles who had spent most of their lives in Russia, backed up by Soviet tanks, and carrying out economic and foreign policies in support of Soviet interests. Resistance in Hungary was met with brute Soviet force, and when even a reformist government in Czechoslovakia was swept away by Soviet tanks, this demonstrated the definitive moral bankruptcy of Communism in the eyes of Eastern European intellectuals.

These intellectuals belonged to a generation that reached maturity and studied during the De-Stalinization era, looked with a kind of utopian hope at the future for Communism, and were eventually left with disillusionment after 1968. To this generation belonged all the great future dissidents such as Zdenek Mlynar, but also future reformist leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev - and Mlynar and Gorbachev had actually been dorm roommates in the 1950's.

Another major role was played by European detente and the eventual creation of the Helsinki Agreements in 1975. By 1968, Western Europe had become more open to Eastern proposals for a European security conference. The Eastern countries especially desired Western European recognition of their borders, and assurrances of non-interference. Western Europe used the opportunity to seek increased cultural and economic contact between East and West, with the conscious strategy to undermine the isolation that the Communist regimes imposed on their populations.

By 1970 this resulted in East- and West-Germany recognizing eachother, and in 1973 the so-called Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) was launched, taking place in Helsinki.

After some tough years of negotiating, both sides got what they wanted. Eastern Europe got their security assurrances, recognition, economic investment and promises of non-interference. Western Europe got the promise from Eastern Europe that they recognized human rights as a necessary condition for security in Europe, and thus uphold human rights as declared by the UN in their country. Initially, the Soviets had no intention of honoring that principle, just as the West had no intention of abbandoning its attempts to interfere in Eastern European affairs.

No one had any illusions in 1975 about this. But all parties agreed to hold follow up summits in 1977, 1980 and 1986 to review the implementation of the agreements. This was crucial for the dissident movement in Eastern Europe, who almost immediately began to form monitoring groups that smuggled information about violations to the West, so that Western diplomats could confront them at the Helsinki summits. The Moscow Helsinki Group for example, became a very important circle of dissidents monitoring Soviet compliance with the agreements and staying in contact with Western media, diplomats, NGO's and human rights watchdogs. Their international fame made them difficult to deal with for the KGB, which tried to put them in psychological hospitals, put them under house arrest in isolated cities, intimidate them, and eventually often ended up expelling them from Soviet territory.

Scholars call this the "boomerang effect", in which dissent - which finds no means to influence the regime, reaches out to governments abroad to exert pressure on the regime instead. As Soviet-American relations deteriorated by the late 1970's, the Carter and Reagan administrations threw their full support behind the dissident movements and the Helsinki agreements - even though they were skeptical of its use in 1975.

The 1975 agreements had also made the Eastern bloc economically dependent on the West. For many Warsaw Pact countries, increased trade with the West was a two-edged sword. It was a way to become more economically autonomous from the Soviets, and more prosperous, but also inevitably exposed their societies to more contacts with the free West and weakened their information monopoly. By the late 1970's, Western investments were crucial to the Soviet bloc to bring in much-needed consumer goods and advanced products, but also to export goods for much-needed foreign currency. The criticism of Western leaders and diplomats was not something they could easily ignore anymore.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 however led to international sanctions and backlash. So a dangerous cocktail of growing dissent, generation gap, economic stagnation, sanctions, and weakening political legitimacy was brewing behind the iron curtain.

So in short, the coming of age of a generation of disillusioned intellectuals, the declining political legitimacy of the communist regimes after 1968, the arrival of human rights on the international agenda in 1975 with the Helsinki Agreements, the declining economies and subsequent international isolation after the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan were some major factors that shaped the conditions in which visible opposition movements emerged across Eastern Europe and to which those regimes had no answer. When the masses threw their support behind them in 1988-1989, the Communists saw no other way out anymore than to negotiate with the opposition and allow free elections. Those that refused ended up dead.