Fall of the Communist Bloc
The Era of Stagnation (also the Brezhnevian Stagnation) was a period of economic, political, and social stagnation in the Soviet Union, which began during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev (1964 -- 1982) and continued under Yuri Andropov (1982 -- 1984) and Konstantin Cherneko 1984 -- 1985). During this period of time, the Brezhnev Doctrine permitted Moscow to intervene in the internal affairs of Eastern Bloc states if socialism were threatened in any of the satellite states. The Brezhnevian Stagnation period came to a close when Mikhail Gorbache, who succeeded Chernenko, introduced his policies of glasnost (openness), perestoika (economic restructuring), uskoreiye (a speed up of economic development), and demokratizatsiva (democratization). These new policies crested on the growing anti-communist sentiment and economic difficulties, all of which coalesced, leading to the Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
During the late 1980s, a weakened Soviet Union gradually pulled away from previous policies that forced them to interfere in the internal affairs of Eastern Bloc nations. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was a reform-minded leader, whose rejection of the Brezhnev Doctrine in 1985 signaled the trend towards greater liberalization. His introduction of a battery of new liberalization policies served as catalyst for numerous independence movements. He announced what was jokingly called the "Sinatra Doctrine" after the singer's famous song titled My Way, to allow the Warsaw Pact countries of Central and Eastern Europe to determine their own internal affairs during this period. After the long war in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union was struggling economically and did not have the resources to continue its control over Central and Eastern Europe.
This was a major break with the earlier Brezhnev Doctrine, under which the internal affairs of satellite states were tightly controlled by Moscow. This had been used to justify the invasions of Czechoslovakia in 1968 as well as of the non-Warsaw Pact nation of Afghanistan in 1979. By the late 1980s, structural flaws within the Soviet system, growing economic problems, the rise of anti-communist sentiment and the effects of the Afghan war made it increasingly impractical for the Soviet Union to impose its will on its neighbors.
