It was 20 years ago today

That is the theme of the special edition of New Statesman which reminds us what a very different world it was then.

It was the year that saw the crumbling of the Iron curtain.At the time it seemed almost a fairytale.Events were running out of control and it was all over in a flash with the Christmas day executions of the Ceausescu's the culmination of two months of intense focus on the communist block.

But the year had other defining moments too in world events.The death of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Tiannaman square massacre.

And in Britain things were changing two.1989 saw the first rumblings of discontent over the Thatcher government that was to culminate in Poll tax riots and her resignation a year later.

Football would never be the same again after the Hillsbro disaster and would be reborn at a multi billion pound leisure industry a few years later.

Editor Jason Cowley sums it up

And yet nothing was certain; this feeling of being in suspension, of not knowing what would happen next, of living at the end of one world-historic era while waiting for another to begin – this sense, more personally, of having graduated and now to be on the cusp of adulthood at just this moment of quickening change: the feeling was heady. It felt as if the world was indeed in motion, not quite spinning out of control but in new and strange ways; a world turning, breaking apart and re-forming, a world in flux.