Word: bulgarias
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LOOKING only to the events of this past year, numerous images claim indelible places in our memory and imagination. Millions marched in China's capital for political reform this spring before they gathered in East Germany. Leaders in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria have followed the Soviet Union's lead step-by-step in opening up totalitarian regimes...
...crude warning to Bulgarian political activists to watch their step. It was one more indication of just how nervous Eastern Europe's remaining hard-line regimes have become as a result of the year's dramatic political changes elsewhere in the bloc. The obdurate rulers in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Rumania refuse to imitate their reformist neighbors but can't help looking anxiously over their shoulder. "They are all worried about the fallout from change elsewhere," said a Western diplomat in the region. A Bulgarian proverb captures the fears: "When the Gypsy's bear is dancing in your neighbor's yard...
...Once unified by Moscow's tight grip, the countries of Eastern Europe are breaking free unevenly. Poland and Hungary lead the way, East Germany is groping to catch up, and Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Rumania remain far behind. As the participants -- even Gorbachev -- improvise from one day to the next, old alliances are being strained. "Almost overnight," says Adam Bromke of the Polish Academy of Sciences, "all the rivalries and tensions in the bloc that Communist orthodoxy had papered over for decades burst into the open...
...common vision of where they are going. Acknowledged Solidarity leader Lech Walesa: "Nobody has previously taken the road that leads from socialism to capitalism." Poland and Hungary are pressing ahead with sweeping reforms that promise to disprove the theory that totalitarian regimes cannot change. Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Bulgaria tinker with old formulas in hopes they can stave off a reckoning with the new. Only Rumania, under the tyrannosaurus-like leadership of Nicolae Ceausescu, stubbornly pursues the Stalinist agenda without obstruction. As each country feels its way through this difficult period, the competing ambitions are putting considerable strain...
Refugees also continue to pour out of Bulgaria; more than 312,000 ethnic Turks have fled over the past three months. With hundreds of thousands more refugees expected, the Turkish government reached the limits of its patience last week and closed the frontier to refugees not carrying visas. At 3:26 a.m. Tuesday, a train packed with ethnic Turks pulled into the Kapikule railway station, across the border from Bulgaria. At 6:10 a.m. the train began to move -- but in the wrong direction. Young refugees jumped from the windows and flung themselves on the tracks. Finally...