FEATURES OF SOCIO-POLITICAL PROCESSES IN EASTERN EUROPE AND THE USSR AT THE TURN OF THE 80-90S. 20TH CENTURY
The article analyzes the events in Eastern Europe that took place in 1988-1989 and the result of which was the fall of the pro-Soviet communist regimes in the countries of this region, their transition to the US sphere of influence and, ultimately, their accession to NATO and the European Union. These events are called "velvet revolutions". The USSR itself did not survive much the kindred and established regimes with its participation in the Eastern European countries. This fact became the basis to a number of researchers to consider the analyzed events as links in one chain - the collapse of the socialist system and the triumph of the liberal idea. However, the authors of this article question such an interpretation of these processes, given that their “positive result” for the Eastern European countries and the republics of the Soviet Union, especially the RSFSR, is far from identical, and in many respects directly opposite. Taking into account this peculiarity of the historiographic situation, the authors attempted to analyze the revolutionary changes in the east of the European continent, to focus on the most significant differences in events and processes in the USSR, on the one hand, and the states of Eastern Europe, on the other. The study is focused not on the Soviet Union as a whole, but on its largest republic, the RSFSR, the immediate predecessor of the post-Soviet Russian Federation, and among the Eastern European states, the authors do not analyze Yugoslavia and Albania, since the events in these countries developed so specifically that they require a separate comparative study. The chosen approach allows researchers to come to an understanding of the causes of the well-known finale of the events of the late 1980s. for the RSFSR, which, according to the authors, was closer to some of the Central Asian republics of the former USSR than to its own Baltic republics and, moreover, to the Eastern European once “fraternal countries”.