Gyula Horn, leader in Hungary's transition from communism, dies

Bloomberg News

BUDAPEST, Hungary -- Gyula Horn, a former Hungarian prime minister who helped trigger events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall when he symbolically cut the Iron Curtain in 1989, has died. He was 80.

Horn, who was the communist regime's last foreign minister and later embraced free-market policies including the sale of state assets to foreign investors as premier from 1994 to 1998, died in Budapest after a prolonged illness, the government said on its website Wednesday.

Horn's journey took him from a young communist militant who aided Soviet troops in crushing Hungary's uprising in 1956 to being a top diplomat who helped usher the country out of Moscow's sphere of influence.