What is an Iron Curtain country?
The beginning of the end of communism in Eastern Europe wasn’t the opening of the Berlin Wall, but rather two events that happened in Hungary in 1989. In June, the Hungarian border command was reduced to a very small unit (something like a Western country’s immigration service, rather than a full-blown Communist-style border-sealing unit) and they removed the barbed wire along the Austro-Hungarian border. This was mostly symbolic since the Hungarian premier had granted Hungarians full freedom of travel and started to move toward a democratic form of government, but it brought on the second act, which was NOT symbolic. Under Warsaw Pact rules, citizens of any Warsaw Pact country could travel to any other Warsaw Pact country. After the barbed wire was removed, a lot of East Germans figured they could go through Hungary, which was still a Warsaw Pact nation, to get to West Germany. When the East Bloc was still in operation, any East German who managed to escape to West Germany or the west
