Fall of the Berlin Wall — Soviet Non-Intervention

Throughout 1989, Gorbachev explicitly refused to authorise Soviet or allied troops to prop up communist governments in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia as popular uprisings swept them from power — a sharp break from the 1968 Brezhnev Doctrine that had sent Soviet tanks into Prague. His press spokesman jokingly dubbed the new policy the "Sinatra Doctrine": each Eastern Bloc state could "do it their way." The Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989 without Soviet intervention.