The Collapse of Communism in Europe:
A Re-examination 20 Years After

5.15pm, 15 OCTOBER 2009
Please note the change in time
10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH

Convenor and Chair: Professor Archie Brown FBA, University of Oxford

The collapse of Communist systems in Europe was probably the single most important political event of the second half of the twentieth century. The decisive year of this transformation was 1989 when Soviet troops stayed in their barracks as, one by one, the East and Central European states became independent and non-Communist. Although the Soviet state did not fall apart until December 1991, most of the defining features of a Communist system also disappeared at least two years earlier. For example, ‘democratic centralism’ – the iron discipline which bound together members of a Communist Party in a rigidly hierarchical structure – was consciously set aside by the reformist wing of the Soviet leadership. Party members, with radically different agendas, competed against one another in multi-candidate elections for a new legislature, granted real powers, in the spring of 1989.

Twenty years after these dramatic changes is a good time to re-examine the fall of Communism, and not only because of the anniversary. The flood of memoirs and the opening of the archives of the Communist era in most of the post-Communist states make it an opportune moment to reappraise the quite sudden end of regimes which just a few years earlier had seemed impregnable.

About the Convenor

Archie Brown is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University where he taught at St Antony’s College for 34 years. His publications include The Gorbachev Factor (OUP, 1996), Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (OUP, 2007) and, most recently, The Rise and Fall of Communism (Bodley Head, 2009).

Speakers

Dr Lilia Shevtsova, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Moscow; Professor Ferenc Miszlivetz, Hungarian Academy of Sciences & University of Western Hungary; Professor Robert Legvold, Columbia University, New York; Dr Andrei Grachev, Paris (former presidential press spokesman for Mikhail Gorbachev); Bridget Kendall, BBC Diplomatic Correspondent, and Professor Timothy Garton Ash, University of Oxford (and Guardian columnist)

Photograph:  Brandenburg Gate. (Photograph) Retrieved 11 August 2009, from Britannica Student Encyclopedia: http//student.britannica.com/ebi/art-89433