Whatever its symbolic value, to the USSR the Berlin Wall was a barrier preventing the best and the brightest of the young, educated East Berliners from fleeing towards a better life in the West. To Europe and the United States, the Wall, isolating the Russian-controlled Eastern half from the Western side, was a physical manifestation of the Iron Curtain, the Soviet policies of repression and domination. It stood almost as long as the Soviet Union stood.

On this day, November 9, in 1989, in the most meaningful act of Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of Perestroika, the Berlin Wall was officially broken.

There was no official demolition ceremony, no big symbolic fall; rather, the wall fell to piecemeal, to innumerable hacks by sledgehammer-wielding Berliners on both sides of the divide. Before gaps were formed, residents crossed through checkpoints without the previous restrictions. Less than a year later, Germany’s East and West, formerly similarly divided, were reunited as one.