Contemporary (1950 CE - Present)
Reagan at the Berlin Wall
On June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan gave an historic speech to the people of Berlin.
Berlin Wall Memorial at the Baker Institute (Rice University)
In 2000, 11 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Rice University installed a section of the wall as a permanent part of the Baker Institute.
Goodbye, Comrade...
Of all of the East Central European revolutions, only Romania's turned violent. After government security forces killed protesters in the city of Timisoara, violence broke out between the army and the secret police, with the army standing by the protesters.
Berlin 9 November 1989
With the regime in disarry, an announcement that travel restrictions would be liberalized led East Germans to rush for the wall; confused guards let them pass, and by nightfall, Berliners from both sides had converged on the hated barrier and begun chipping away.
Comrades - It's Over!
Poster circulated by the anticommunist organization, Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) in the summer 1989 marking the anticipated departure-eviction of the Soviet Red Army troops who had kept Hungary in the Soviet bloc since the end of World War II.
For Them We Have Already "Voted"
March 1989 election poster for the nationalist "Sajudis" movement in Lithuania, wryly alluding to the Soviet leaders pictured here - Stalin, Molotov, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev - whose rule had been imposed on the Baltic countries since World War II and ratified through sham elections.
It Must Not Happen Again (1)
One of a set of posters reflecting glasnost-era exposès of the crimes of the Stalin era - including collectivization, purges, and the gulag.
It Must Not Happen Again (2)
One of a set of posters reflecting glasnost-era exposès of the crimes of the Stalin era - including collectivization, purges, and the gulag.
Wolf Vostell - 9 November 1989
A more abstract image of the night the wall fell appears in this painting by an artist whose work had also appeared on the western side of the wall itself.
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A poster distributed by the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ), a liberal political party founded in 1988 in opposition to the Communist Party in power in Hungary. This poster alludes to the martyrs of the 1956 Soviet invasion to put down the Hungarian revolution.