Word: blocs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Through some eight hours of back-room combat, Strougal and his allies gradually broke down the resistance of Jakes holdouts, including trade-union representatives, while wooing the bloc from the Slovak republic, which was trying to boost its own influence. In exchange, the reformist camp had to make three concessions. They allowed two hard-liners, Prague party leader Miroslav Stepan and trade-union boss Miroslav Zavadil, to keep their Politburo seats. The five Slovak members of the Politburo also would retain their posts, including Jozef Lenart, despised for his collaboration with the Soviets in the post-invasion...
...Sunday, in the kind of head-spinning turn of events that is now the norm in the Soviet bloc, East Germany's Egon Krenz resigned as Communist Party leader -- while retaining his post as leader of the state -- and his entire Politburo and Central Committee stepped down as well. Asked about German unification at Sunday's press conference, Gorbachev said some questions must be left for "history" to decide and cautioned against doing "anything to accelerate these changes artificially." That call for prudence seemed ironic coming from the statesman who had done more than any other in this half...
...Liberal Democrats were long allied with the Communist Party but have since said that they will no longer run in a Communist-led bloc...
...week were inspired by, among others, Frantisek Cardinal Tomasek, 90, who has become an increasingly militant proponent of change. The ousted Jakes regime, which had permitted the appointment of six new Catholic bishops, only two weeks ago concluded a round of talks at the Vatican. In East Germany, the bloc's only predominantly Protestant state, this year's pro-democracy movement emerged from small church gatherings that, through the 1980s, criticized the Communists' handling of foreign policy, disarmament and the environment. A bishops' statement read from every pulpit Sept. 10 detailed "long overdue" changes. Most of the mass rallies...
...Christmas, the Berlin Wall has suddenly lost the cachet it once had for spy writers. For Le Carre the timing of the Wall's decline as a cold war symbol is only slightly awkward. His latest novel, The Russia House, fails, unsurprisingly, to anticipate the collapse of the East bloc, but it does deal credibly with the slipperiness of glasnost and the refusal of U.S. hard-liners to embrace perestroika. Deighton, on the other hand, is caught embarrassingly short. Spy Line, his new novel, puts him five books into a convoluted six- volume series that depends on East Germany...