On Dec. 22, 1990, Polish labor leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa was sworn in as the first non-communist president of Poland since the end of World War II, a decade after he took over the leadership of a 1980 strike of shipyard workers in Gdansk.
A year earlier, on Dec. 22, 1989, the government of Romania’s communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown after the army defected to the cause of anti-communist demonstrators, ending 42 years of communist rule.