AP®︎ European History: Topic 9.7 Flashcards

Collapse of Soviet-dominated communist governments beginning in 1989 and of the USSR in 1991, ending Soviet control of Eastern Europe and the Cold War

Soviet leader from 1985 whose reforms and refusal to enforce communist rule militarily unintentionally accelerated the collapse of the Soviet bloc and USSR.

Gorbachev’s policy of “restructuring” the Soviet economy and administration through limited decentralization and market mechanisms

Gorbachev’s policy of “openness” permitting greater access to information, public criticism, and freedom of expression

The 1986 Soviet nuclear reactor catastrophe that exposed administrative and safety failures, secrecy, and the need for glasnost

Soviet claim to a right to intervene when communist rule was threatened in a bloc country, a policy Gorbachev effectively abandoned

Independent Polish trade union and opposition movement founded in 1980 that challenged communist rule and won the freely contested seats in the 1989 elections

Polish labor leader who led Solidarity’s challenge to communist rule

1989 agreements between Poland’s communist government and opposition that legalized Solidarity and established partially free elections

Partially free elections in which Solidarity’s overwhelming victory exposed the communist government’s lack of popular legitimacy

Rapid, mostly peaceful overthrow of communist governments across Central and Eastern Europe after the Soviet Union withdrew its military guarantee

Opening of East Germany’s Berlin Wall crossings on November 9, 1989, symbolizing the collapse of communist authority and Europe’s Cold War division

Overwhelmingly peaceful 1989 revolution in Czechoslovakia that ended the Communist Party’s monopoly and brought Václav Havel to the presidency

Czechoslovak dissident playwright who became president after the Velvet Revolution ended communist rule

Repressive Romanian communist dictator overthrown and executed during Romania’s violent December 1989 uprising

East Germany’s October 3, 1990, incorporation into the Federal Republic of Germany, extending West German democratic and capitalist institutions eastward

Negotiations between East and West Germany and the four victorious World War II powers that secured international agreement for German reunification

Russian reform leader who resisted the August 1991 coup, displaced Gorbachev politically, and helped dissolve the Soviet Union

Failed hard-line attempt to remove Gorbachev and restore central control that instead discredited the Communist Party and accelerated Soviet dissolution

December 1991 breakup of the USSR into fifteen independent states, definitively ending the Cold War’s Soviet superpower bloc

Organization created in December 1991 by Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus as they announced that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist

Replacement of central planning with private ownership, market prices, commercial institutions, foreign trade, and investment after communist rule

Rapid postcommunist liberalization of prices and privatization of state enterprises intended to create a market economy quickly

Small group of wealthy business figures who acquired major former state assets during Russia’s poorly regulated privatization

Peaceful January 1, 1993, division of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia

Breakup of the Yugoslav federation beginning in 1991, accompanied by nationalist wars, ethnic cleansing, and genocide

Admission of former communist states to the EU, especially eight in 2004 and Bulgaria and Romania in 2007