Developments during the 1980s did much to vindicate Bernhard Steinberger's long-standing diagnoses of the East German economic model. In those countries were the Soviet sponsored states of Eastern Europe had traditionally been able to trade East Germany had during the 1960s and 1970s enjoyed a near monopoly in heavy engineering and other "technical" manufacturing sectors, but during the 1980s, as heavy industry in the Soviet Union began to modernise, East German salesmen in shared export markets began to encounter Soviet comrades not as partners but as commercial rivals. Increasingly dependent on variously disguised West German subsidies, the country was running out of cash and credit. After 1985 Winds of change blowing across from, of all places, the Moscow Kremlin left East Germany's increasingly geriatric political leaders feeling isolated and uncertain about the future (although their commitement to "traditional" socialism appeared solid). When street protesters breached the Berlin Wall in November 1989 it quickly became clear that Soviet troops standing by had received no orders to intervene on behalf of the status quo. There would be no repeat of 1953. Events assumed their own momentum. That was the context in which, on 15 January 1990, Bernhard Steinberger saw an opportunity to renew his campaign for justice with an application to the High Court in East Berlin for the "revision of the judgments against Harich, Steinberger and Hertwig". He summarized again his reform ideas from 1956, which had simply revolved around the increasingly mainstream goals for a de-Stalnized socialist party and the establishment of a democratic East German state.