The Pan-European Picnic on the Austrian-Hungarian border on 19 August 1989 is an often-overlooked turning point in Europe's history. The peace demonstration that succeeded in opening a chink in the Iron Curtain is now recognised as a key event in the collapse of the Communist bloc.

With Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms under way and his vow not to use military force against Eastern European countries, many of the Communist regimes had begun to relax controls and look towards the West in the late 1980s.

1989 - The year that reshaped Europe

The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 symbolised the end of Communism in Europe in a dramatic fashion.

Radio Netherlands Worldwide marks the anniversary with a series of portraits of former communist countries, once firmly closed off behind the Iron Curtain.

We look at how regimes changed but also how ordinary people changed. And did the hopes and dreams of the democratic revolutions become reality, or were they shattered?
 

In Hungary the new reform-minded Communists who had come to power agreed to allow the Picnic's organisers to symbolically cut through the barbed wire on the border next to the gate that divided East from West. The plan was that for a few hours people would be able to stroll back and forth across the border for the first time in four decades.

East Germans on holiday
The authorities, however, had not counted on the picnic being gate crashed by hundreds of East Germans, who were in Hungary on holiday. They grasped this chance to find a way across the border and escape the particularly repressive regime of Erich Honecker. When the wire was cut they rushed towards the border and the Hungarian guards decided not to try to stop them. This was the first time since the Berlin Wall was put up that such a large number of people had escaped through the Iron Curtain.

The following month, Hungary opened the border for good and thousands more East Germans took this route to the West, starting a chain of events leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

Economic downturn
Twenty years later in Hungary itself, economic woes are leading to dissatisfaction with what’s been achieved since the country’s peaceful transition to democracy. In 1989, Hungarians ate in a restaurant on average once a week. And they went to the cinema regularly. Now, that's out of the question, except for the richer few. Unemployment is at ten percent and the economic crisis is proving a stern test of Hungary’s still relatively young democratic institutions.

Listen to a report by correspondent Nick Thorpe from Budapest.