November 2014 saw the quarter-century anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the most poignant events in the past century. The inhabitants of Berlin broke the graffiti-covered concrete down with hammers or pickaxes and climbed over the wall. The historic milestone was followed on televisions around the world. After forty years of separation between communism and capitalism, the Iron Curtain opened on November 9^th 1989. Which economic and political developments preceded this event?

The arrival of Gorbachev in 1985 ushered in the Glasnost period. With this, hope for more liberty of action in Eastern Europe grew in satellite states such as Poland and Hungary. In 1989, the Communists in Hungary decided to hold free elections. In the summer of that year, the same happened in Poland. That same summer, the Hungarians began to remove the barbed wire at the Hungarian-Austrian border. Through this gap, East Germans fled en masse from Hungarian campsites to the West. It was the prelude to the dramatic decision of the GDP to open the border on November 9^th 1989.