Factor behind the fall of communism in Eastern Europe Essay

Factor behind the fall of communism in Eastern Europe - Essay Example Communisms can also be well-defined as the principle of the circumstances of the public or waged people. This is a category of people in the society who live totally from the sale of their labour without profit and capital gains.   The proletariat in a word is the working class of the 19th  century. The lay man’s understanding of communism is that it is the rule of the gun in which the elite minority control the masses through all manner of oppression and exploitation, it started in 1945 and ended in 1991. Before the end of cold war in 1991 the world was divided into two blocs the Eastern and the Western (Western Europe and America). The Eastern Bloc which was the communist comprised of the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, East Germany, Hungry and Yugoslavia, with Poland being the largest communist country  apart from the Soviet Union however there were other communist  countries outside Europe such as Cuba (Levesque, 2010, p. 7). Many factors were respon sible for the collapse of communism, in this essay only three are explored namely nationalism, economic and ideology. Great emphasis is placed on economic as the main cause that affected Eastern Europe. Communism collapsed in 1989 and the iron curtain was dismantled with the demolition of the Berlin wall (Zubok, 2010, p.7). A long period of silence existed known as the cold war and set the world in two separate blocs the western and the eastern plus their allies. The standoff resulted into tension, suspicion, anxiety and fear among the rivaling blocs. An opaque situation existed known as the Iron Curtains that promoted heinous acts of oppression, nepotism, corruption and lack of accountability between the two blocs. This resulted into separation of Europe with a manmade Berlin wall. The insecurity and tension felt on both sides led to the nuclear arms race giving rise to the development of defense organizations in Europe i.e. the WARSAW pact and the NETO (Howard, 2003, p. 10). Befor e looking at the factors that led to the overthrow of communism