Year In Review: Requiem For The Revolutions

TBILISI -- In 1989, seven months before the Berlin Wall came down amid jubilant celebrations across Europe, Ghia Marghulia joined thousands in the center of the Georgian capital to protest Soviet rule.

Now the director of a Tbilisi public school, Marghulia sits in his office and recalls the tense and heady atmosphere two decades ago when, in the midst of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika-era reforms, Georgians contemplated the unthinkable -- breaking free from Moscow's grip and winning their independence.

"We had already swallowed some freedom and it was not possible to go back to the old limits," We made a lot of mistakes. We all yearned for freedom, but we did not prepare for this freedom
Marghulia says. "We began to talk about how Georgia needed to be a free country." We made a lot of mistakes. We all yearned for freedom, but we did not prepare for this freedom

But the Kremlin had other ideas. In the small hours of the morning on April 9, after days of demonstrations, Soviet troops moved in to surround the demonstrators, and attacked them with military batons and spades. Nineteen Georgians were killed, including a 16-year-old girl.

Tbilisi's bloody 1989 spring was followed by an autumn of change in Eastern Europe, when peaceful protests in places like Prague and East Berlin -- and more violent clashes in Romania -- toppled Soviet satellite regimes across Eastern Europe, brought down the Iron Curtain, and ended the Cold War.

As the world marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain this year, the different fates of the countries of the 1989 revolutions came sharply into focus. Former Soviet vassal states like Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia are free, stable, and prosperous democracies safely nestled in NATO and the European Union.

But countries like Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova, which won their independence following the 1991 Soviet collapse, have experienced a tumultuous two decades as they struggled to fully break free from Moscow's grip, establish functioning democracies, and fully join the West.

Marghulia notes that most countries emerging from Soviet rule were simply not prepared for what came next once they achieved independence.

"We made a lot of mistakes. We all yearned for freedom, but we did not prepare for this freedom," Marghulia says.

"We all thought that when we got freedom, then everything else would take care of itself. We weren't prepared. We didn't prepare people to be good ministers, good administrators. We didn't have any concept about how to develop our state."

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