AUTHOR'S BIO
Michael Meyer
Michael Meyer, Newsweek’s bureau chief in Germany and Eastern Europe in 1989, is author of The Year That Changed the World.
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The Zambian Candidate
Michael Meyer Series: Into Africa 2011-09-28Events in Zambia seldom reverberate globally, but Zambia's recent presidential election should. What made the election so important is that, while other African presidents have clung to power by ignoring defeat and repressing opponents, the challenger in Zambia won – and the incumbent conceded gracefully.... read Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 5638
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Bear Hunting in Romania
Michael Meyer Series: The World in Words 2009-12-18Just as the glory of the French Revolution ended in the Terror, so Eastern Europe’s miracle year of 1989 ended in blood. Whereas communist regimes elsewhere seemed almost to run from power, Romania’s communist masters ordered the security forces to fire on the people – and they obeyed.... read Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 15641
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The Triumph of the Powerless
Michael Meyer Series: The World in Words 
2009-11-18
In early June 1989, Václav Havel was released from jail, full of what now seems an almost prophetic certainty. Four months later, Havel's sense of Czechoslovak communism's imminent demise was proved correct.... read Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 9467
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The “What If?” of 1989
Michael Meyer Series: The World in Words 2009-11-04The fall of the Berlin Wall is one of the iconic images of the twentieth century, but the moment itself was more ambiguous, particularly with the hindsight of two decades. Simply put, history could easily have played out very differently, and almost did.... read Comments: 1 Recommended: 2 Read: 11204
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Bringing Down the Wall
Michael Meyer Series: The World in Words 2009-06-01
The victory twenty years ago – on June 4, 1989 – of the famed opposition trade-union movement, Solidarity, in Eastern Europe’s first free election since 1946 was eclipsed by the violent crackdown in Beijing and Ayatollah Khomeini’s death. Yet no single event did more to bring down communism in Europe – and thus to re-shape the post-war international order.... read Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 10438
