<Ul> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> </Ul> <P> The Revolutions of 1989 were part of a revolutionary wave in the late 1980s and early 1990s that resulted in the end of communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond . The period is sometimes called the Autumn of Nations, a play on the term "Spring of Nations" that is sometimes used to describe the Revolutions of 1848 . </P> <P> The events of the full blown revolution began in Poland in 1989 and continued in Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania . One feature common to most of these developments was the extensive use of campaigns of civil resistance, demonstrating popular opposition to the continuation of one - party rule and contributing to the pressure for change . Romania was the only Eastern Bloc country whose people overthrew its Communist regime violently, whereas the regimes in Romania and in some other countries inflicted violence on the population . The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 failed to stimulate major political changes in China, but influential images of courageous defiance during that protest helped to spark a precipitation of events in other parts of the globe . On the same day, 4 June, the trade union Solidarity won an overwhelming victory in a partially free election in Poland, leading to the peaceful fall of Communism in that country in the summer of 1989 . Hungary dismantled its section of the physical Iron Curtain, leading to a mass exodus of East Germans through Hungary, which destabilised East Germany . This led to mass demonstrations in cities such as Leipzig and subsequently to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which served as the symbolic gateway to German reunification in 1990 . </P> <P> The Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991, resulting in 11 new countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan) which had declared their independence from the Soviet Union in the course of the year, while the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) regained their independence . The rest of the Soviet Union, which constituted the bulk of the area, became Russia in December 1991 . Communism was abandoned in Albania and Yugoslavia between 1990 and 1992 . By 1992, Yugoslavia split into five successor states: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which was later renamed Serbia and Montenegro in 2003 and eventually split into two states, Serbia and Montenegro, in 2006 . Serbia was then further split with the breakaway of the partially recognised state of Kosovo in 2008 . Czechoslovakia was dissolved three years after the end of Communist rule, splitting peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1992 . The impact was felt in dozens of Socialist countries . Communism was abandoned in countries such as Cambodia, Ethiopia, Mongolia (which democratically re-elected a Communist government that ran the country until 1996) and South Yemen . The collapse of Communism (and of the Soviet Union) led commentators to declare the end of the Cold War . </P>

What symbol of soviet repression and terror fell in berlin in 1989