The Revolutions of 1989 formed 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, the end of the Cold War, and the removal of the Iron Curtain between Eastern and Western Europe. The period is often also called the Fall of Communism and sometimes the Fall of Nations or the Autumn of Nations, a play on the term Spring of Nations that is sometimes used to describe the Revolutions of 1848.
These revolutions began in Poland in 1988, with the Polish workers' mass strike movement on April 21; continued in Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania; and ended when Cambodia enacted a new Constitution, in which Communism was abandoned, on 24 September 1993.
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 and Afghanistan were the only countries whose citizens and opposition forces used violence to overthrow their Communist regimes.