Destruction of Berline wall and "Velvet Revolutions" in East europe (jan 1, 1989 – jan 1, 1991)

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Reagan’s sudden reversal with regard to the Soviet Union worried conservatives — perhaps their cowboy-hero president had been duped by a duplicitous Gorbachev. But Reagan’s gamble paid off. The easing of tensions with the United States allowed the Soviet leader to press forward with his domestic reforms. Encouraged by the loosening of control in Russia, between 1989 and 1991 the peoples of Eastern and Central Europe began to protest their own Communist governments. In Poland, the Roman Catholic Church and its pope — Polish-born John Paul II — joined with Solidarity, the trade-union movement, to overthrow the pro-Soviet regime. Twice in the 1950s, Russian troops had quashed similar popular uprisings in East Germany and Hungary. But under Gorbachev, they did not intervene, and a series of peaceful uprisings — “Velvet Revolutions” — birthed a new political order throughout the region. Communism’s fall even reached into Germany, the birthplace of the Cold War. The destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989 symbolized the end of Communist rule in Central Europe. Millions of television viewers worldwide watched jubilant Germans knock down the hated wall that had divided the city since 1961 — a vivid symbol of communist repression and the Cold War division of Europe.


As the communist government of East Germany collapsed, West Berliners showed their contempt for the wall dividing Berlin by defacing it with graffiti. Then, in November 1989, East and West Berliners destroyed huge sections of the wall with sledgehammers, an act of psychic liberation that symbolized the end of the Cold War. Here, in a calmer moment, a man chisels away at a section of the wall.

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