Word: breakups
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...course of the coup was surreal. Has television, which helped unravel the putsch, come to enforce its own brief attention span upon history? Recent great events -- the breakup of Eastern Europe, the Persian Gulf war, the failure of the coup -- seem to be enacting themselves in shorter and shorter time frames. Three days last week undid 10 centuries of civic dormancy. It is possible that the world is dividing between blood feuders and channel changers. The blood feuders, like zealots in Ireland or the Middle East, cannot forget revenge, even over many years; the impatient channel changers of the electronic...
...Gorbachev's decision to quit the party had the smell of desperation; it is certain to have no impact on the accelerated breakup of the Union and does little to burnish the Soviet leader's credentials as a front-rank reformer. "It would have been greatly to his advantage had he done this a year ago," said Eduard Shevardnadze, a former Gorbachev ally who angrily resigned as Foreign Minister last December and quit the party in July. "But now? It is too late...
...breakup of the Bell Telephone System more than seven years ago appeared to place the industry at the threshold of a quantum leap into the Information Age. But the telephone companies were legally barred from the computerized- data business. Last month U.S. District Court Judge Harold Greene brought the future closer by freeing the Baby Bells to use their phone lines to provide such services as electronic Yellow Pages and home shopping...
Ever since the historic breakup of the Bell System in 1984, the seven local telephone companies known as the "Baby Bells" have been pleading for an end to regulations barring them from the information-services business. Last week a federal judge in Washington finally gave the companies the green light to use their phone lines to provide such services as electronic publishing, computer banking and home shopping. While the Baby Bells rejoiced, the ruling was immediately attacked by newspaper publishers, who fear the loss of classified advertising revenues to the phone companies, as well as information-service vendors...
...cyclical theory of Russian and Soviet history: every interlude of reform inevitably gives way to a resurgence of repression; the good Gorbachev of glasnost and democratization in '89 turns into the bad Gorbachev of Bloody Sunday in Lithuania last January. Others believe in a linear theory: the breakup of the Soviet Empire and the transformation of the internal order have passed the point of no return, the keepers of the Stalinist flame are on their last legs, it is too late for a rightist coup; therefore Gorbachev's accommodations with the right accomplish nothing except to render him irrelevant...