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1989: year of revolutions

It is 20 years since the events in eastern Europe that led to the collapse of communism and the end of the cold war. Here statesmen, revolutionaries, key players, correspondents and others remember their role and evaluate how politics, countries and ordinary people's lives changed
  • Romanian farmer

    Poem of the week: Peasants by Marin Sorescu

    A fictional government report on the most benighted citizens of Ceaușescu’s Romania, this is satire written in a time when all hope of change seemed futile
  • Freedom and Its Adversaries: Timothy Garton Ash and Tom Stoppard attend a debate with students of the Charles University in Prague

    From Prague to Berlin, liberty will always owe youth

    Henry Porter: Student activism has often fired resistance to repression – and it must urgently do so now
  • The 1989 generation has the power – but can it handle it?

    Matthew Ryder
    Matthew Ryder: The 'Niners', led by Barack Obama, have been shaped by a world changed without guns. Never has such idealism been so challenged
  • Seumas Milne

    The real lesson of 1989 is that nothing is ever settled

    Seumas Milne
  • 1989: the battle for hearts and minds

    Rumy Vakarelska
  • Reality tempers joy of Romania's 1989

    Lucian Dan Teodorovici
    Lucian Dan Teodorovici: Year of revolutions: As a boy I wept for joy when communism ended. But the din of freedom in a plundered nation has drowned out my dreams
  • Solidarity under strain

    Adam Michnik
  • Daring to remember Bulgaria, pre-1989

    Maria Todorova
  • The Berlin wall was the real 9/11

    Victor Sebestyen
  • East Germans lost much in 1989

    Bruni de la Motte
  • Winners and losers of 1989

    Joschka Fischer
  • 1989 memories leave Czechs confused

    Michael Simmons
  • How capitalism let Hungary down

    Gyula Hegyi
  • Renewing 1989's rejection of totality

    Antony Lerman
  • Timothy Garton Ash

    1989 changed the world. But where now for Europe?

    Timothy Garton Ash

    Year of revolutions: Sunk in the narcissism of minor difference, Europe is failing to face up to the world its revolution helped to create
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