1989: Thirtieth Anniversary Of A Year Of Change

Thirty years ago, in 1989, revolutions in the Warsaw Pact countries led to the collapse of the communist system in central and eastern Europe and foretold the end of the Soviet Union. To assess the long-term impact of these changes, join Current Time for a look at how people today remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, and the overthrow of the Ceausescu regime in Romania.

The upheavals of 1989 that led to the collapse of eastern Europe’s communist governments would prove to be precursors of the USSR’s own collapse, but, at the time, this was far from clear. To find out firsthand how then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev interpreted the destruction of the Berlin Wall and Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, Current Time spoke with Andrei Grachev, Gorbachev’s press secretary from August – December 1991.