Word: callings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Though a supporter of Gorbachev's basic reforms, he used the Congress of People's Deputies as a tribune to attack him for accumulating too much personal power. "There are no guarantees that a Stalinist will not succeed Gorbachev," he warned. The release of political prisoners motivated him to call ever more insistently for the liberation of those still in the Gulag. He himself was elected to the new People's Congress, but he continued to battle for the multiparty system he knew was indispensable if true democracy was ever to come to his homeland. Andrei Sakharov did not live...
This time, by golly, no one would call George Bush timid. Quite the contrary, the President made a rare appearance as Bush the riverboat gambler. By sending a high-level delegation to Beijing to confer with Chinese authorities who only six months earlier had ordered the massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators near Tiananmen Square, Bush knew he would stir up a hurricane of outraged protest. And for what? The slender chance that China would respond with concessions that could begin to melt the ice in U.S. relations with the world's most populous nation...
...News-desk staffers sometimes have to call us at 2 or 3 a.m.," says Eastern Europe bureau chief John Borrell, who over the past few months has come to view sleep as a hobby that he once had time for. "In soft, soothing tones that the Metternich school of diplomacy would doubtless endorse, they first apologize profusely for waking you and then tell you that the editors need to know, generally instantly, something like the GNP of each Warsaw Pact country. The secret, which they have mastered, is to be smooth and nonchalant...
There have probably been moments, like the one last week, when Gorbachev had second thoughts about the telephone call he made to the city of Gorky in 1986, informing Sakharov and his wife Elena Bonner that they could return to Moscow after seven years of political exile. Like the prophets of biblical times who appeared before kings at the most inconvenient times with uncomfortable truths, the distinguished nuclear physicist and Nobel Peace Prize winner was always insisting that Soviet citizens deserved better, much better, than what the Soviet system had to offer. But last week's brisk exchange was destined...
Still in the saddle after Hollywood, hard drinking and two failed marriages, the rambunctious novelist has just produced what critics call his best book to date...