Word: blocs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Like the West, the East has sprouted its own supranational institutions--all under Soviet control. The Warsaw Pact, signed in 1955, formalized Soviet direction of Eastern Europe's armed forces. The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, or Comecon, was set up to coordinate and integrate East bloc economies; the system has been as ungainly as its foundation stone, Soviet-style central planning...
With the exception of Bulgaria, which has strong historic ties to Russia, East bloc attitudes toward the Soviet Union range from distrust to outright loathing, an attitude that stands in sharp contrast to a hunger among East Europeans for most things Western. Through much of the East bloc, youngsters wear blue jeans and dance to Western rock; purple-haired punks are seen in the streets of Warsaw and Budapest. More important, East European governments have turned to the West for the credits and technology that Moscow cannot provide, giving East Europeans a vested interest in the revival of détente...
...BLOC PARTY...
While aspiring to postpunk art-house dance music, Bloc Party wisely refuses to let its genre fixations get in the way of tunefulness. There's an actual melody here, and a good one, driven on by the manic playing of Matt Tong, rock's best new drummer in years...
...forbearance allowed him to attain a position of near partnership with the communist regime. Poland rolled back martial law in 1983 and--with the acquiescence of Mikhail Gorbachev--communism itself in April 1989. The largely peaceful transition seems to have influenced Gorbachev's approach to the other seceding East bloc nations and forever linked John Paul's name with communism's demise. Wrote the former Soviet leader in 1992: "Everything that happened in Eastern Europe in these last few years would have been impossible without the presence of the Pope and without the important role--including the political role--that...