Fighting for Freedom

Resistance to tyranny and authoritarian regimes has always been a special focus of the Hoover Institution Library & Archives collecting, research, and publications. One emphasis for Hoover’s work has been the dissident movements in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite states.

By the 1980s, resistance against communist regimes grew into popular protests, as the forces of freedom began to gain the upper hand. The year 1989 was the turning point, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall in November. The transitions to democracy in the former Soviet bloc countries continued into the 1990s.

China, meanwhile, introduced a form of capitalist economy in the 1980s, but in 1989 its communist rulers declared martial law and ruthlessly suppressed a nascent democracy movement, massacring students and others protesting in Tiananmen Square.

Building the Berlin Wall

The wall consisted of sixty-six miles of concrete segments and forty-one miles of barbed-wire fencing and was guarded by more than three hundred watchtowers. Daring attempts to cross from East to West Berlin punctuated the Cold War. In all, some five thousand people successfully escaped to the West, while an estimated two hundred people were killed attempting to do so.

Bringing Down the Wall

At 7:00 p.m. on November 9, 1989, an announcement of the opening of the border crossings from East to West Berlin prompted Berliners to pour into the streets and make their way to the wall in jubilant celebration.

Some of the revelers were equipped with hammers and chisels to begin the demolition of the hated symbol of the Cold War. The two Germanys were officially reunified in October 1990. The dismantling of the wall lasted into 1992.

The End of Communism in Czechoslovakia

Václav Havel was a leading figure in the country’s 1989 Velvet Revolution, so named because of the peaceful nature of the country's political transition from an authoritarian regime to a parliamentary democracy.

Havel became president of Czechoslovakia in December 1989. When the country split in two in 1992, he became president of the Czech Republic, a position he held until 2003.

Solidarity Movement

Solidarity (Solidarność) was a Polish labor union formed in the Lenin Shipyard in the city of Gdansk in 1980. One of Solidarity’s co-founders, an electrician named Lech Wałęsa, became the union's first leader.

Solidarity quickly grew into a nationwide non-violent, anti-Communist resistance movement. In December 1981, Solidarity was outlawed and Wałęsa was arrested as the Polish government introduced martial law and began a brutal crackdown.

The organization survived underground and, as Communist rule began to falter in the late 1980s, it emerged as Poland’s largest political party.

Lech Wałęsa

In the national elections of June 1989, Solidarity won a resounding victory and led Poland’s first post-Communist government. The following year, Wałęsa was elected president of Poland, the first non-Communist head of state in forty-five years.

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