Sinatra Doctrine

The Sinatra Doctrine was the name that the Soviet Government of Mikhail Gorbachev used to describe its policy of allowing the neighbouring countries of the Warsaw Pact to resolve their internal affairs and fix their political evolution.

The Sinatra Doctrine was the name that the Soviet government of Mikhail Gorbachev used to describe its policy of allowing neighboring Warsaw Pact countries to resolve their internal affairs and determine their political evolution. This doctrine was named in honor of Frank Sinatra after the song "My Way" by the American singer, since it allowed these nations to define the solutions to their internal problems in their own way, in contrast to the previous Brezhnev Doctrine, which had served to justify the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

History

The phrase was coined by Gennadi Gerasimov, official spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union on October 25, 1989 during an interview with American television. During the interview, Gerasimov was asked about the Soviet reaction when some Warsaw Pact countries, such as Poland and Hungary, began to apply policies copied from perestroika. The Soviet Minister Eduard Shevardnadze had said two days before that the USSR recognized the freedom of choice of the other Warsaw Pact countries regarding their political line. Gerasimov replied:

We have today the doctrine of Frank Sinatra. He has a song, I Did It My Way (I did it my way). Thus, each country decides on which way to go (...) the political structure should be decided by the people living there

The phrase also implied that the USSR would not intervene to stop such processes, in contrast to the criticisms of the communist government of the German Democratic Republic led by Erich Honecker, who had lamented months before the rupture of socialist unity after the massive flight of East Germans to Austria using Hungary as a transit country, and that he had asked the Kremlin for some action to stop the excessive liberalization that the Hungarian and Polish governments were beginning to apply.

When Shevardnadze invoked the Sinatra Doctrine, the most conservative communist leaders of the Warsaw Pact understood that they could not wait for an armed intervention by the USSR to stop in their countries the demands in favor of imitating the model of perestroika.

Consequences

As a result of this policy, various States allied to the Soviet Union, which formed the so-called Eastern Bloc, found it necessary to initiate gradual reforms to reduce the pressure on their societies, since they could not count on Soviet support to deny such demands to its inhabitants. Days after this declaration, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, ending the Cold War.