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On the east side of the Iron Curtain were the countries that were connected to or influenced by the Soviet Union, while on the west side were the countries that were NATO members, or connected to or influenced by the United States; or nominally neutral. Separate international economic and military alliances were developed on each side of the ...
The fall of the Iron Curtain was accompanied by a massive rise in European East-West migration. [131] Famous Eastern Bloc defectors included Joseph Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva, who denounced Stalin after her 1967 defection. [133]
The initially inconspicuous opening of a border gate of the Iron Curtain between Austria and Hungary in August 1989 then triggered a chain reaction, at the end of which the GDR no longer existed and the Eastern Bloc had disintegrated. It was the largest escape movement from East Germany since the Berlin Wall was built in 1961.
Map of countries in 1989. This is a list of countries by population in 1989, providing an overview of the world population before the fall of the Iron Curtain.. While the population data [1] is almost exclusively dated 1989, political developments before the summer of 1990 are taken into account, including Yemeni unification and Namibian independence but not German reunification which was ...
The Warsaw Pact (WP), [d] formally the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance (TFCMA), [e] was a collective defense treaty signed in Warsaw, Poland, between the Soviet Union and seven other Eastern Bloc socialist republics of Central and Eastern Europe in May 1955, during the Cold War.
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe: Warsaw , Berlin , Prague , Vienna , Budapest , Belgrade , Bucharest , and Sofia .
"If there is a new iron curtain, we do not want to be behind it," he said, referring to the Western term for a dividing line between eastern and western Europe during the Cold War.
By the end of World War II, most of Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union in particular, suffered vast destruction. [9] The Soviet Union had suffered a staggering 27 million deaths, and the destruction of significant industry and infrastructure, both by the Nazi Wehrmacht and the Soviet Union itself in a "scorched earth" policy to keep it from falling in Nazi hands as they advanced over 1,600 ...