Word: berlins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Most important, Gorbachev ended the Soviet subjugation of Eastern Europe. For decades, the key fact of life in Eastern Europe was that Big Brother in Moscow was prepared to use tanks, bayonets and KGB advisers to keep little brothers in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and Berlin in power. Gorbachev put the communists in what used to be the Soviet bloc on notice that they were on their own. That meant they were finished...
...liberating itself from Moscow, he told his aides and speechwriters to avoid any appearance that he was "poking a stick in Gorbachev's eye." Later that year, when the East German Communist regime threw open Checkpoint Charlie at Moscow's behest, Bush vowed he would not "dance on the Berlin Wall." And during the climax of the gulf war, he deliberately avoided humiliating Gorbachev over the failure of his last-minute interventions...
...morning of May 5, some 400 people gathered in a park near Berlin's Alexanderplatz and scattered flowers at the base of the Marx-Engels memorial to commemorate the 173rd birthday of the philosopher who prophesied the ultimate triumph of proletarian revolution. Karl Marx, proclaimed a speaker, should not be blamed for the errors of the former Socialist Unity Party, which for 40 years had ruled East Germany. WE'LL DO BETTER NEXT TIME read a slogan someone had chalked at the base of the memorial. WE'RE NOT GUILTY said another. A third graffito was sardonically realistic...
...suffering for their sins. Gunter Schabowski, a former editor of the party newspaper Neues Deutschland, recently suffered the humiliation of being rejected for a menial job at the city's waterworks. But he may have been relatively fortunate. Another red Bonze (bigwig) was reportedly seen washing dishes at Berlin's Grand Hotel -- rather like those exiled archdukes from czarist Russia who eked out a living as waiters and doormen in post-1918 Paris...
Except for a few interpreters and administrators, the East's entire 2,500- member diplomatic corps was dismissed. Hermann Schweisau, who was East Berlin ambassador to Finland, Afghanistan and Vietnam, is currently deputy head of the Association of Former Diplomats, which has helped about 125 of his former colleagues train for jobs in sales, insurance and banking. "A lot of potential is being wasted," he says, noting that many of his clients are knowledgeable about countries where the Federal Republic had little or no diplomatic representation. "The former ambassador to Mongolia is just sitting at home, although...