Word: blocs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...After weeks of debate, academy members finally voted Nobel Peace laureate Andrei Sakharov one of their 20 seats in the congress. Independent deputies and supporters of such unofficial groups as the popular front movements in the Baltic States have already gathered in Moscow to discuss forming a loose parliamentary bloc called the March Coalition. The group could attract as many as 10% of the members of the new Congress of People's Deputies, presenting Gorbachev with something akin to an organized opposition...
Under NATO's flexible response policy, the allies could respond to a Soviet bloc attack with either conventional or nuclear weapons...
...past decade Marxist history has lost its sway as many French intellectuals grew disillusioned with East bloc totalitarianism. A revisionist school, influenced by nonpartisan British and American scholars, presents a more complex picture of the revolution: nobles seeking to weaken royal power played a driving role in the rebellion, for example; few peasants suffered under a feudal yoke. In the U.S. a much heralded new work by Harvard University's Simon Schama, called Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, depicts the ancien regime in a positive light -- not too differently from France's current best seller La Revolution...
...multiparty system. Last week Solidarity backed a preliminary slate of twelve candidates, including a film idol, a schoolteacher and a former political prisoner, to run in the parliamentary elections scheduled for June. If successful, Poland's experiment could set an example to be followed by other reform-minded East bloc countries and prompt a further warming in U.S.-Soviet relations...
...fundamentally flawed. It seeks from the men in the Kremlin something they are already willing to grant -- latitude for diversity and liberalization in the "fraternal" countries of Eastern Europe. And it offers in return assurances that have little to do with the Soviets' real fears -- political deterioration inside the bloc, not a military threat from outside. Moreover, the forces that stand ready to exploit the trouble are also internal, not external; they are domestic hard-liners, not CIA or Pentagon mischief-makers...