1989 was the year in which Vaclav Havel went from jailed dissident to revolutionary leader to president. Twenty years on, we profile the leading figure of then-Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution.

In 1989, British writer and Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash reported on the wave of democratic revolutions that swept Europe. On the eve of celebrations marking Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, he spoke to RFE/RL about the legacy of the events he witnessed 20 years ago.

As part of RFE/RL's series on the revolutions of 1989 that toppled communism in Central and Eastern Europe, RFE/RL visits one Czech family to hear how they remember 1989 -- and how they feel today.

Public cynicism and corruption in politics are threatening democracy in Europe. That's according to a group of writers and scholars taking part in a conference today marking the 20th anniversary of the democratic revolutions that swept Central and Eastern Europe in 1989.

Adam Michnik, the editor in chief of Poland's "Gazeta Wyborcza" and a leading member of the Polish democratic opposition from 1968 to 1989, was in Prague this week to attend a conference marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain. He spoke to Irina Lagunina of RFE/RL's Russian Service about Russia, the West, and the post-Soviet letdown felt in the former Eastern bloc countries.

Before the autumn revolutions in Eastern Europe, there was the Moscow Spring in the Soviet Union. In 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev's reform policies hit their high-water mark, as the USSR held its first competitive elections, press freedom flourished, and civil society awakened.

The 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall helped transform global geopolitics by triggering the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But it also set in motion Asia’s dramatic economic rise -- the speed and scale of which have no parallel in world history.

On November 10, 1989, one day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Todor Zhivkov, Bulgaria's longtime communist dictator, stepped down amid a "revolution" staged by the reformist wing of the Communist Party. Journalist Ekaterina Boncheva looks back at her memories of that day.

Nowhere was the fall of the Berlin Wall celebrated more enthusiastically than in East Germany's "restricted zone," a high-security area that ran the length of the East-West border. Residents of the zone lived with harsh travel bans and nightly curfews for more than 40 years.

Before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, Radio Free Europe provided listeners with comprehensive information and coverage about the changes sweeping Eastern Europe. It was partly thanks to RFE that the communist regimes were unable to keep the various protests isolated from one another or to restrict the circulation of ideas.

Some were peaceful and some were violent. Some were popular revolts and some were orchestrated within the Communist Party leadership. The revolutions of 1989 cast aside Europe's Cold War dictators, paving the way for democracy and the free-market reforms of the 1990s.

As a "Newsweek" bureau chief, Michael Meyer was a professional observer of the revolutionary wave that swept across Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. He recalls some of the milestone moments of the 1989 revolutions.

Physically, little today is left of the Berlin Wall, the potent symbol of Germany's Cold War division. But the psychological barrier between East and West still runs deep two decades after the wall's destruction.

In November 1989, we were given a chance, and we are doing relatively well. We are part of the broader world. Our children are growing up in a sort of democracy. They can travel and study abroad. They speak many languages and so hold the keys to open other worlds. Nonetheless, all is not right.

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, people in countries that were once behind the Iron Curtain have mixed feelings about the changes democracy and capitalism have brought to their lives. A new survey finds general satisfaction but also disappointment.