Word: brezhnevs
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STARS IN THE MORNING SKY, Contemporary Theater, Moscow. Galina Volchek directs a superbly acted indictment of the Brezhnev years, a play depicting how drunks, prostitutes and madmen were swept off the streets of Moscow and into exile as Soviet authorities polished up the capital on the eve of the 1980 Olympic Games...
Party lines, like glaciers, do move. But for Soviet artists, glasnost seems more like a whirlpool of possibilities, most of them still anxiously hypothetical. The artists have had to learn not to be optimists. Fifteen years ago, Leonid Brezhnev's officials sent plainclothes militia and bulldozers to break up and bury an outdoor show of unofficial art in Sokolniki, a park on the outskirts of Moscow. This goons' picnic would not be repeated today. The socialist realist line, imposed by Stalin after 1929 and kept to the end of Brezhnev's reign, held that a work of art should fulfill...
Such confusion aside, 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...
...directly negotiate the future of Eastern Europe at a kind of "Yalta Two," a latter-day reprise of the much criticized wartime agreement that cemented the East-West division of Europe. Moscow would agree to tolerate hitherto unprecedented political and economic liberalism in the East and would renounce the Brezhnev Doctrine. In return, the West would assent to the "legitimate" Soviet security interests there, including the implicit promise not to seek the reunification of Germany or pursue any other military advantage...
...than productivity, inflation threatens. Other figures indicated that exports fell by 2% in 1988, while imports (much of it food) rose by 6.5%. "The honeymoon for Gorbachev has ended at home," says a Moscow-based Western diplomat. "Gorbachev's been in power too long to blame it all on Brezhnev...