ABSTRACT
Events were moving quickly in 1989. The Soviet army was pulling out of Afghanistan while the Communist government in Warsaw began talking to the Solidarity trade union. By May, Hungary had opened its border with Austria, and by September they had done the unthinkable, allowing East Germans to leave for what is still widely known as “the West.” The peoples of Czechoslovakia united in a new October revolution: the Velvet Revolution. Then in November came the most symbolic event of all, the fall of the Berlin Wall. The crumbling of the Iron Curtain ensured the collapse in rapid succession of the Bulgarian and Romanian regimes, culminating in a firing squad shooting dead the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, on Christmas Day. The notoriously brutal and complex security system through which he ruled quietly vanished.
