Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Poland's First Post-Communist PM, Dead at 86

Helped introduce democratic reforms in Eastern Europe

(Reuters)—Polish statesman Tadeusz Mazowiecki, whose appointment in 1989 as the first non-communist prime minister in the Soviet bloc helped usher in democratic change across eastern Europe, died on Monday aged 86.

Tributes poured in from Poland, Germany and beyond for the shy former dissident intellectual who was famously photographed making a victory sign in August 1989 after his appointment by the Soviet-backed Polish president, General Wojciech Jaruzelski.

By the end of that year, the Berlin Wall had fallen, communist regimes in Moscow's other satellite states had collapsed and the Cold War division of the continent was over.