Word: blocs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...youths are growing restless because of contact with the freedoms and goods of the West, while an increasingly impatient cadre of younger, more reformist party figures are chafing over the closed door to change at the top. While East Germany seems out of step with other countries of the bloc, it is still marching toward its own brand of Communist crisis...
...that East Germany's orthodox course ultimately leads to a dead end. A Prussian work ethic and meticulous implementation of carefully honed five-year plans are no longer quite enough. Even that well-oiled machine is wearing down under the same contradictions of Communism that have driven other East bloc economies onto the rocks. Pointing to the increasing scarcity of consumer goods, ten- year waiting lists for East German-made Trabant automobiles and deepening competition in foreign markets from third world producers, a Western diplomat in Berlin says, "They are treading water. Everything is getting pretty waterlogged...
Whole segments of the East bloc, once firmly under the thumb of Soviet orthodoxy, are launched in headlong pursuit of a new political and economic order. But not all. In Bulgaria an aging leadership shows no sign of interest in homegrown perestroika. In Czechoslovakia, where leading dissident Vaclav Havel has been sentenced to jail, trials moved into a second month for other activists held on charges ranging from organizing peaceful antigovernment demonstrations to signing political petitions. And in Stalinist Rumania, party leader Nicolae Ceausescu remains the "Idi Amin of Communism," as his neighbors call him. The unregenerate totalitarian, obsessed with...
...Communist Yugoslavia, not a member of the Soviet satellite bloc, reform moves have opened yawning rifts between the country's eight diverse republics and provinces and a flock of feuding ethnic groups. Serbian nationalists, led by the charismatic Slobodan Milossevic, are pursuing a dream of dominance in one part of the country, while a divided national leadership is struggling to stave off collapse of the Yugoslav economy...
...there is little doubt about the Soviet determination to hang on to Eastern Europe, the only place where Communist regimes have been successfully maintained at bayonet point from outside. For all the experimentation, Gorbachev has not come close to renouncing the Brezhnev doctrine, which asserts Soviet authority over the bloc. Gorbachev is not the only one without a thought-through policy. Neither the U.S. nor its Western allies have one either, making an answer to the second question elusive. Only now are Western governments beginning to explore the potentially titanic implications of the changes under...