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A decade of economic stagnation in Eastern Europe and growing debt to
Western banks (which shows the extent to which the Soviet bloc was linked
to the international economy) increased pressures for change throughout
the region. In the mid 1980s Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev began
to loosen his country's control over Eastern Europe and implement some
of the same reforms in the USSR that Hungarian and Czech leaders had unsuccessfully
promoted years before. The Soviet Union withdrew its troops from
Hungary and most of Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. In this photo,
taken in 1989, the post-communist Hungarian government is giving an official
reburial to Imre Nagy, the leader of the 1956 uprising. Other heroes
of the 1956 were also reburied in a national repudiation of Stalinism and
Soviet domination.
