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Between June 1989 and April 1991, every communist or former communist country in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia—and in the case of the USSR and Yugoslavia, every constituent republic—held competitive parliamentary elections for the first time in many decades. Some elections were only partly free, while others were fully democratic.
Now 30 years removed from 1989's "annus mirabilis" -- Central and Eastern Europe's year of miracles, when communist regimes seemingly toppled like dominoes -- it's easy to focus on the Western ...
It was one of the series of events that started the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. The fall of the inner German border took place shortly afterward. An end to the Cold War was declared at the Malta Summit in early December, and German reunification took place in October the following year.
The six Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe, while nominally independent, were widely recognized as the Soviet satellite states (along with Mongolia). All had been occupied by the Soviet Red Army in 1945, had Soviet-style socialist states imposed upon them, and had very restricted freedom of action in either domestic or international affairs.
The crisis that emerged in Yugoslavia was connected with the weakening of the Communist states in Eastern Europe towards the end of the Cold War, leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In Yugoslavia, the national communist party, officially called the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, had lost its ideological base. [16]
The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe was published by Oxford University Press, New York in 1993 and is a work of non-fiction based on events in Eastern Europe from 1968 to 1991. It was written by Gale Stokes, then a professor emeritus of history at Rice University.
9 November 1989 – The fall of the Berlin Wall, enabling East Germans to travel freely to the west. [3] 1 December 1989 – The Volkskammer removes section of the East German Constitution granting the SED a monopoly of power, thus ending Communist rule in East Germany. 3 December 1989 – The Socialist Unity Party's stepping down. [8]
The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc (Combloc), the Socialist Bloc, and the Soviet Bloc, was an unofficial coalition of communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America that were aligned with the Soviet Union and existed during the Cold War (1947–1991).