Word: communist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...goods of the West, while an increasingly impatient cadre of younger, more reformist party figures are chafing over the closed door to change at the top. While East Germany seems out of step with other countries of the bloc, it is still marching toward its own brand of Communist crisis...
Even 60 years later, Soviet farmers have not forgiven Joseph Stalin for taking away their land. Now Mikhail Gorbachev is offering, more or less, to give it back. Under a new policy unveiled by the Soviet President last week at a plenum of the Communist Party's Central Committee, private farmers will be able to lease land for 50 years and beyond and even pass their tenancy on to their children. It will, Gorbachev declared, make the Soviet farmer "the master on the land...
Unseasonably warm weather in Warsaw, 340 miles to the north, brought more political change into bloom. Two weeks ago, the Jaruzelski government and the Solidarity-led opposition agreed to hold elections for a second chamber of parliament, a revived senate that would include non-Communist candidates. Party leader Wojciech Jaruzelski, who presided over the crackdown outlawing Solidarity in 1981, was uncharacteristically exuberant: "Significant progress is being made to construct parliamentary democracy in Poland." In a church basement across the city, Solidarity leader Lech Walesa told his supporters that Poland was entering a decisive stage "we hope will lead to democracy...
...Communist Yugoslavia, not a member of the Soviet satellite bloc, reform moves have opened yawning rifts between the country's eight diverse republics and provinces and a flock of feuding ethnic groups. Serbian nationalists, led by the charismatic Slobodan Milossevic, are pursuing a dream of dominance in one part of the country, while a divided national leadership is struggling to stave off collapse of the Yugoslav economy...
...years, Moscow has had two goals in controlling its neighbors: to protect Soviet borders from the threat of the West and to provide trading partners and markets for Communism. Gorbachev appears to have altered these canons. He aims to rework if not junk the centralized and self- contained Communist economies. And he seems to consider the traditional definition of security, in the form of a chain of subservient states, no longer entirely relevant. In fact, his policies indicate that he probably considers revolution or economic collapse within the rigidly controlled Soviet empire a far more plausible threat than attack from...