Word: communist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...pattern continued for months. Something extraordinary would happen in the East -- down would come the barbed wire along the old Iron Curtain, off would go the light in the red star over the parliament building, home would go trainloads of Soviet troops, in would come a non-Communist prime minister -- and the response from Washington was the sound of one hand clapping. There were schoolmarmish homilies about the need to "test" Gorbachev's slogan of new political thinking and complaints about what he had not done for the West lately...
...Milos Jakes, the beginning of the end came early last summer. In a series of private exchanges between the Czechoslovak Communist Party leader and Mikhail Gorbachev and his advisers, the Soviet President made clear that his own internal situation demanded a repudiation of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. If Jakes, 67, did not want to be undercut by the Soviet move, he would have to act -- and act soon. An agreement between Moscow and Prague was struck. Come October, Jakes would convene a Central Committee meeting and expel all Politburo members tainted by the 1968 invasion -- except himself. After appointing...
...Jakes launched a last-minute bid to crush the uprising. Advised by Czechoslovakia's military that it would take no part in a violent action against the populace, Jakes turned in desperation to the People's Militia, units composed mostly of factory workers that function in effect as the Communist Party's private army. Beginning Nov. 19, militia units were deployed at factory gates and inside industrial compounds around the country. Care was taken to ensure that each unit was deployed outside its own home region. However, the show of militia force served only to spark further protests...
Foreign policy will be the most obvious point of conservative contention in a post-Communist world. How long will we be in favor of maintaining garrisons in West Germany, South Korea and points between once the garrisons on the other side become unthreatening? Irving Kristol and Tom Bethell have been urging for years that the U.S. wind down NATO. The tradition of American noninterventionism is a long one (we like pedigrees for our prejudices). America should not "go abroad in search of monsters to destroy," as John Quincy Adams put it. "She is the well-wisher to the freedom...
...pell-mell surge of events in Eastern Europe left Moscow to make a virtue of necessity, giving its blessing to an erosion of Communist power that it could do little to reverse in any case. Meanwhile, the U.S. is in no better position to impose its will on its robust NATO allies, especially a West Germany that has become the engine of change on the Continent, pouring the deutsche mark into Eastern Europe the way the dollar once flowed to the Western nations under the Marshall Plan. All through the summit the German question hung in the air, although...