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Fall of the communism

Revolutions of 1989
Part of the Cold War
Thefalloftheberlinwall1989.JPG
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989
Date 9 March 1989 – 27 April 1992
(3 years, 1 month, 2 weeks and 4 days)
Location Central and Eastern Europe
Caused by
Goals
Methods Mass protests
Civil unrest
Riots
Coup attempt (Soviet Union, in August 1991)
Resulted in
Parties to the civil conflict
Citizens of Eastern Bloc nations
Also known as: Fall of Communism, Fall of Stalinism, Collapse of Communism, Collapse of Socialism, Fall of Socialism, Autumn of Nations, Fall of Nations, European Spring

The Revolutions of 1989 were part of a revolutionary wave in the late 1980s and early 1990s that resulted in the end of communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond. The period is sometimes called the Autumn of Nations, a play on the term "Spring of Nations" that is sometimes used to describe the Revolutions of 1848.

The events of the full blown revolution began in Poland in 1989 and continued in Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania. One feature common to most of these developments was the extensive use of campaigns of civil resistance, demonstrating popular opposition to the continuation of one-party rule and contributing to the pressure for change. Romania was the only Eastern Bloc country whose people overthrew its Communist regime violently, whereas the regimes in Romania and in some other countries inflicted violence on the population. The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 failed to stimulate major political changes in China, but influential images of courageous defiance during that protest helped to spark a precipitation of events in other parts of the globe. On the same day, 4 June, the trade union Solidarity won an overwhelming victory in a partially free election in Poland, leading to the peaceful fall of Communism in that country in the summer of 1989. Hungary dismantled its section of the physical Iron Curtain, leading to a mass exodus of East Germans through Hungary, which destabilised East Germany. This led to mass demonstrations in cities such as Leipzig and subsequently to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which served as the symbolic gateway to German reunification in 1990.


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Wikipedia

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