The year 1989 was the beginning of the end of Communist governments in several eastern European countries.
People in Poland, Hungary, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, the German Democratic Republic, and elsewhere began demanding rights and freedoms that had been suppressed under Communism.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall, the symbolic structure separating Communist East Germany from West Germany, fell, and Germany reunified the following year.
By the early 1990s, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia broke apart along religious and ethnic lines and several new countries were formed.
Yugoslavia today is now only the republics of Serbia and Montenegro.
The former Yugoslav republics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Slovenia, and Croatia are independent countries.
In 1993, Czechoslovakia split into the two countries that are now called the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic.
