1989 Polish legislative election in the context of "Revolutions of 1989"

The Warsaw Pact (WP), formally the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance (TFCMA), was a collective defense treaty signed in Warsaw, Poland, between the Soviet Union and seven other Eastern Bloc socialist republics in Central and Eastern Europe in May 1955, during the Cold War. The term "Warsaw Pact" commonly refers to both the treaty itself and its resultant military alliance, the Warsaw Pact Organisation (WPO) (also known as ‘Warsaw Treaty Organization’ (‘WTO’)). The Warsaw Pact was the military complement to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), the economic organization for the Eastern Bloc states.

Dominated by the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact was established as a balance of power or counterweight to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Western Bloc. There was no direct military confrontation between the two organizations; instead, the conflict was fought on an ideological basis and through proxy wars. Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact led to the expansion of military forces and their integration into the respective blocs. The Warsaw Pact's largest military engagement was the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, one of its own member states, in August 1968. All member states participated except for Albania and Romania, resulting in Albania's withdrawal from the pact less than one month later. The pact began to unravel with the spread of the Revolutions of 1989 through the Eastern Bloc, beginning with the Solidarity movement in Poland, its electoral success in June 1989 and the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989.

The Revolutions of 1989, also known as the Fall of Communism, were a wave of liberal democratic movements that resulted in the collapse of most Marxist–Leninist governments in the Eastern Bloc and other parts of the world (this wave is sometimes referred to as the "Autumn of Nations", in reference to the Revolutions of 1848 as the "Spring of Nations"). The revolutions of 1989 were a key factor in the dissolution of the Soviet Union—one of the two superpowers—and abandonment of communist regimes in many parts of the world, some of which were violently overthrown. These events drastically altered the world's balance of power, marking the end of the Cold War and beginning of the post-Cold War era.

The earliest recorded protests, which led to the revolutions, began in Poland on 14 August 1980, the massive general strike which led to the August Agreements and establishment of Solidarity, the first and only independent trade union in the Eastern Bloc, whose peak membership reached 10 million. The main region of the 1989 revolutions was Central Europe, starting in Poland with the 1988 Polish strikes, and continued in Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. On 4 June 1989, Poland conducted the first elections that led to the dissolution of the communist government, with Solidarity winning an overwhelming victory, leading to the peaceful fall of communism in Poland. Influenced by Poland, Hungary organised round table-format talks and began dismantling its section of the Iron Curtain. In August 1989, over a quarter of the Baltic states population physically chained for 675 kilometres (419 mi) in the Baltic Way protesting the occupation by the Soviet Union, while the opening of a border gate between Austria and Hungary set in motion a peaceful chain reaction, in which the Eastern Bloc disintegrated. This led to mass demonstrations in cities of East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, which served as the symbolic gateway to German reunification in 1990. A feature common to these developments was the extensive use of campaigns of civil resistance, demonstrating popular opposition to the continuation of one-party rule and contributing to pressure for change. Romania was the only country in which citizens and opposition forces used violence to overthrow its communist regime, although Romania was politically isolated from the rest of the Eastern Bloc.