Word: blocs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WARSAW, Poland--Parliament yesterday approved the first East bloc government not led by Communists, giving half the seats to Solidarity but reserving the key ministries controlling defense and police for the Communists...
Mazowiecki told Parliament he came "as a man of Solidarity, faithful to the legacy of August" 1980, when Solidarity became the first legal independent union in the East bloc...
Hungary, in a decision announced Saturday, was the first Eastern bloc government to help the citizens of another communist country to freely leave their homeland...
...formulas in hopes they can stave off a reckoning with the new. Only Rumania, under the tyrannosaurus-like leadership of Nicolae Ceausescu, stubbornly pursues the Stalinist agenda without obstruction. As each country feels its way through this difficult period, the competing ambitions are putting considerable strain on the bloc...
...certain that Eastern Europe will ever regain cohesion. Radical reform and conservative intransigence make uncomfortable bloc fellows. Comecon, the alliance's economic union, is crumbling as members scramble to cut separate deals with the West. And the allies are at one another's throats: the Czechs and Rumanians denounce the Polish reformers for sowing chaos, the Poles denounce the Czechs for trampling human rights, the Hungarians denounce the Rumanians for mistreating their Hungarian minority. Gorbachev's phone conversation with Rakowski last week suggests that the Soviet leader finds better promise in an uncharted future than in a failed past...