Just to demonstrate how ridiculous your question is: it is meaningful only when asked of someone who has lived through the 80s with some degree of social and political awareness and that means people who were at minimum 18 and ideally 25 in 1981. Which means that you need to ask people born in 1956 to 1963 i.e. 61 to 68 year olds. Otherwise you're asking about fantasies of people who have no reference or idea to that specific point in human history.
Do you see any Soviet bloc pensioners around here?
I was a teenager at the time but I spoke often about that period since I come from a family that was politically involved so I probably will be your best approximation.
First of all it's not "Eastern Europe" but "Central Europe" or "Eastern Bloc". These two are meaningful. "Eastern Europe" is an American invention and it's not meaningful. Eastern Europe is literally mostly just Russia. Former Prussia, Austro-Hungary and Crown of Poland is central Europe and has been since the high middle ages. The division between central and eastern Europe goes through modern day Belarus and Ukraine and splits the countries into "western" and "eastern" parts while all of the Baltics are in central/northern Europe. Similarly the division between central and south-eastern Europe (Balkans) splits Romania into fairly distinct regions.
It's relevant because if Poland was in Eastern Europe we would be like Belarus and had no problem with Russia. We have a problem with Russia because we aren't in eastern Europe. You may as well go to England and tell them they're French because they have "Dieu et mon droit" as their national motto.
Seriously: start using proper classification and you will see how much clearer and logical geopolitics of the region suddenly becomes. The current geopolitical tensions emerge directly from those cultural and political dynamics of the past. All of EU politics is based on the natural European divisions. You will understand nothing if you keep thinking that Europe is divided into "west" and "east" because that has never been the case.
Returning to your question:
Firstly:
In the 1980s there was only the official television and radio channels. There were less than ten government-owned newspapers with national circulation. Every medium was extremely heavily censored and communicated using extreme political correctness.
If you have not been a young adult before the advent of accessible internet (WWW) in late 1990s you will likely not have the intuitive understanding of how scarce the information about reality was at the time. The best source for expanding your knowledge was a library and it was time consuming. It took time and effort. I am very much a product of that era and that system which is really quite obvious if you think why I write the way I do (and to the extent that I do). I vividly remember the transition from pre-internet to early-internet to the shitshow of today.
Important things would happen and unless they were part of political propaganda you would learn about them a week, two weeks or a month after the fact.
Secondly:
All Soviet bloc countries were nominally led by a collective authority elected from the party. The party was the institution that was in charge of political life and the functional administration was managed by party personnel or the military or the security apparatus. Because of that there was never a sense that any individual leader had that much impact on what was happening in politics. The knowledge of palace coups was common - we just used different language to describe them.
The party was in charge of the country. The party leadership was in charge of the party. The leader of the leadership was in charge of the leadership. The best analogy is EU politics. Do you think EU collapses if Von Der Leyen suddenly disappears? If you lack intuitive understanding of what the politics of China is, look to that (if you understand EU political dynamics) and it's not that different at all.
Even contemporary East Asian societies that are nominally "Western aligned" for political purposes like Japan
are more similar in their workings to Soviet bloc countries. Anyone in China would just look at you confused. The kind of chaos that is currently happening in the US would only be possible in China if the country was in a state of collapse. That's how different the western and eastern modes of social organisation are.
Brezhnev was incapable of leading since mid 1970 due to his health. When Andropov and later Chernenko took over it was a natural occurrence that was communicated in the media as a matter of fact. When Gorbachev took over it was communicated in the media as a matter of fact. When Gorbachev announced his "glasnost" and "perestroyka" it was communicated in the media as a matter of fact.
Nothing even remotely resembled the personal and factional chaos of present-day American politics.
In Eastern political systems political change only happens once there's sufficient momentum and force to enact it.
In Western political systems political change is a constant process even when nothing is changing per se.
This is a difference of perception of reality - order into chaos vs chaos into order. You can't compare the two. Similarly when the revolutions of 1989 happened it was a very "eastern" process where the popular uprising swept away the crumbling power in a manner that would very much fit the Chinese "lost the mandate of heaven" events - just without the loss of life on a Chinese scale.
For example when in June of 1989 in Poland the first partially free election took place which ended with all of the 30% of free seats being taken by the opposition it wasn't a chaotic event like American elections in 2016, 2018, 2020 or 2022. There were strikes then there was a "round table" series of talks between the authorities and the opposition and then there was the election that the government expected to win. And they lost so badly that they effectively crumbled as an ideological front.
And because the Polish system was never a genuine "one party" system like in China or USSR - but a system where the communist party had a set number of seats in the parliament guaranteeing majority and other minor parties approved by the communists
served as "loyal opposition" then as soon as the 30% of seats were lost within two months the other parties switched front and a democratic majority was technically possible.
And as soon as that happened - effectively instantly - we found ourselves in what mirrors the current US political system just with multiple parties during the 1990 presidential and 1991 parliamentary election which was followed by another parliamentary election in 1993.
But before then the facade of unity was so strong that many people - despite overwhelmingly supporting the democratic opposition - were convinced that the government was going to win the election. Largely that was why the loss of just 30% of seats was such a crushing blow. It shattered the notion that the government was in control of its own faculties. If there is any resemblance between current US politics and the 1980s it's how closely the pre-June 89 and post-June 89 government in Poland resembles Biden pre and post debate with Trump.
In that - yes - it is almost a mirror-like image.
But the other countries had different stories and the Soviet dissolution is an extremely convoluted one as well one that has nothing to do with the electoral process but rather was the equivalent of the de-colonisation of British imperial posessions after WW2.
The closest analogy to what is happening in the US right now would be the August 1991 coup but that was a proper military coup with military in the streets and two political entities (Soviet Union and Russian Federative SSR) in overt legal and political conflict. January 6 seemed sort of like that - interstingly Pence would be Yeltsin - but not on the same scale.
The kind of mess that we're watching live in America did happen in the Soviet bloc but you would only learn about it from second-hand reporting or history books. They were events like the 1956 coup that removed stalinist faction from power once Khrushchev took over (interestingly, with a non-trivial role played by China) or the 1970 soft coup which replaced that faction with another. So in effect it was no different than what people in the USSR knew about Khruschev or Brezhnev coming to power.
To ask that question shows a deeply, deeply western mindset. How surprisingly ironic. We are living in a very confusing world aren't we?
