Word: communist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...restructuring," his successor, Petar Mladenov, said, "This implies complex and far from foreseeable processes. But there is no alternative." In all of what used to be called the Soviet bloc, Zhivkov's departure leaves in power only Nicolae Ceausescu in Rumania and Milos Jakes in Czechoslovakia, both old-style Communist dictators. Their fate? Who knows? Only a few weeks ago, East Germany seemed one of the most stolidly Stalinist of all Moscow's allies and the one least likely to undergo swift, dramatic change...
...major dissident organization. Founded only in September, it claims 200,000 adherents and has just been recognized by the government, which originally declared it illegal. The opposition pledged to keep up the pressure for a free press, free elections and a new constitution stripped of the clause granting the Communist Party a monopoly on power...
...Central Committee responded in co-opting language. "The German Democratic Republic is in the midst of an awakening," it declared. "A revolutionary people's movement has brought into motion a process of great change." Besides underlining its commitment to free elections, the committee promised separation of the Communist Party from the state, a "socialist planned economy oriented to market conditions," legislative oversight of internal security, and freedom of press and assembly...
...alliances that have divided Europe (and Germany) for 40 years seem less urgent militarily in the Gorbachev era. But they now must play a political role that is no less critical. At the beginning of 1989, way back when Hungary's Communist rulers were just considering whether to allow independent parties and Poland's were still debating whether to talk with Solidarity, the challenge seemed to be to find ways to ease Eastern Europe from the claws that had clutched it for four decades. In fact, Moscow seemed all too eager to remove those claws. So eleven amazing months later...
...find families sundered and the city rived by barbed wire -- and soon concrete -- many frantically sought routes of escape. The Berlin Wall was meant to halt a tide of migrants to the West that had left East Germany short of workers and threatened the stability of the Communist regime: more than 2.7 million had departed since the founding of the German Democratic Republic in 1949, 30,000 in July 1961 alone...