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Chronicle 1989

"The Wall … will still be standing in fifty and even a hundred years' time": that's what Erich Honecker is still saying at the end of January 1989. And the GDR does seem stable to most people at the time, even though the dilapidated condition of industrial plants, the old parts of cities and the roads, as well as the air and water pollution, all herald the imminent economic disaster. more
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  • July

     
    • 4 July

      1989

      Newly appointed West German Chancellery Minister Rudolf Seiters pays SED General Secretary Erich Honecker a first visit in East Berlin. more
    • 7 July

      1989

      Warsaw Pact conference in Bucharest
      At the Warsaw Pact summit in Bucharest, the Soviet Union officially gives up the Brezhnev doctrine of the limited sovereignty of its member states, and announces "freedom of choice". more
    • 7 July

      1989

      A demonstration by civil rights activists at Alexanderplatz in East Berlin in protest at the vote-rigging on May 7 is broken up by a massive police detachment. – There are also demonstrations against this electoral fraud at the end of the alternative church congress "Statt-Kirchentag" in Leipzig on July 9.
    • 9 July

      1989

      Ethnic unrest in the Soviet Republic of Moldova.
    • 9 July

      1989

      James Baker, US Secretary of State
      US President George Bush and US Secretary of State James Baker begin a trip to Europe. The first countries they visit are those where the process of reform is most advanced: Poland and then Hungary.


      These visits are of great symbolic significance, but there is disappointment in Warsaw and Budapest at the small amount of financial aid and trade relief promised by the US. The United States does not want to destabilise the Soviet Union; Bush and Baker seek cooperation with Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze.
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    • 15 July

      1989

      The 15th World Economic Summit of the seven leading industrial nations (G-7) in Paris refuses to give China new World Bank loans because of its suppression of the democracy movement.
    • 15 July

      1989

      Coalminers in the Siberian region of Kusbass and in the largest coalfields in the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian Donets basin, strike for higher wages and better living conditions. The strikes finish at the end of July when the coalminers are promised that their demands will be met.
    • 18 July

      1989

      The West German press reports on an increasing wave of refugees leaving the GDR for Austria via Hungary. Many refugees are still being arrested by Hungarian border guards, but they are being less frequently handed over to the GDR State Security. more
    • 21 July

      1989

      More that 150 would-be GDR emigrants have been staying in several West German diplomatic missions in the Eastern Bloc, including those in Budapest and East Berlin, hoping that in this way the authorities will be forced to let them travel to the West. more
    • July 1989

      In July, 11,707 GDR citizens manage to flee to the West; 9563 people are given permission to leave the GDR.
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