By 1989, the world the Berlin Wall had been built to protect was starting to come apart.
Mikhail Gorbachev had come to power in the Soviet Union in 1985, and he had introduced two policies that would fundamentally alter the landscape of Eastern Europe. The first was glasnost — openness, a loosening of political restrictions and a degree of freedom of expression that had been unthinkable under previous Soviet leaders. The second was perestroika — restructuring, an attempt to reform and modernise