Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

were doing and why they were doing it. Things got out of hand in
the 1980s. There is this story about how Moscow issued free TV
antennas in 1980 so that everybody in the Soviet Union could
watch the Olympic Games in Moscow. But all over the Soviet Union
people turned their aerials in the other direction. In the western part
they could watch Finnish and Polish TV. Even though the latter was
communist, it was completely different. This was the time of
Solidarność, so suddenly these people saw the images of striking
Polish workers, while they had been told these were imperialist
agents. But it was plain to see from the pictures of the Gdansk risings
that not only they were genuine workers, they were Catholics
kneeling on the ground in protest. Modern technology had quite an
impact. It greatly contributed to the breakdown of Soviet information
control. Soviet leaders themselves just lost the will to impose
their policies by force. In 1987, Armenia started fighting Azerbaijan
and Gorbachev decided not to do anything. That was the beginning
of the breakdown. After that every republic in the Soviet Union
thought, ‘our chance is going to come quite soon.’
59 Norman Davies