I know things were really bad in 1989, but what made it so bad that people in so many socialist countries just rose up and overthrew their own governments?
people in so many socialist countries just rose up and overthrew their own governments
Where do you get the impression from that the people rose up and overthrew their governments?
Not OP, but the dissolution of the ussr was entirely undemocratic. They also violated the constitution, which did have provisions for leaving, in order to do so.
Some republics did actually leave using the correct procedure. Estonia and Armenia - definitely, Lithuania and Latvia - I think so.
Look up how color revolutions work. They are very much not organic, they are engineered from the outside, and this was the case for most of the counter-revolutionary events of 1989. In Romania it was even more blatantly not a popular uprising, not only was the initial unrest that was used as a smokescreen to mask what actually happened fabricated by western-funded counter-revolutionary cells operating out of Hungary, but what ended up destroying the socialist state was a straight up military coup.
Though the official history that is taught there nowadays doesn’t acknowledge it and pretends it was a “revolution”, at the time even observers writing about the events from outside of Romania could see this:
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/marcy/1990/sm900104.html https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/marcy/1990/sm900111.html
Look up how color revolutions work.
So, similar to the more recent Arab Spring in the early 2010s?