Word: communist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Back in 1947, as it became clear that Poland's Peasant Party would beat the Communists, Stalin's army cut off its phones and eventually sent the party's chieftain, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, fleeing to the West. In Hungary that year, after the anti-Communist Smallholders Party won power, the Soviet army arrested its leader and forced a confession of subversion...
This time in Poland, the opposition movement Solidarity was able to reduce the Communist Party to the role of a supplicant, and may end up forcing the country's ruler, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, out of power. In Hungary, the Smallholders Party is back, feuding with itself and with the dozen or so other parties expected to take part in free elections scheduled for next year...
...political reforms in Poland have the most dramatic flair of any in the Communist world, in part because they are being won under the inspiring banner of Solidarity. Roughhewn shipyard workers such as Lech Walesa and Bogdan Lis survived seven years of repression, forced the government into half-free elections, then humiliated...
Partly because of opposition from Solidarity, General Jaruzelski, the Communist Party leader who declared martial law in 1981, made a startling announcement last Friday that he would not be a candidate in this week's election by Parliament for the powerful new office of President. Instead, with Solidarity's approval, the party is expected to nominate General Czeslaw Kiszczak, 63, the Interior Minister who won the confidence of the union as the government's main negotiator during the round-table talks that led to the democratic reforms. Moscow has invited Walesa to come for a visit to discuss the political...
Hungary has no parallel to Solidarity's opposition, and what does exist is dominated by intellectuals. Instead, the push toward democracy is being led from within the Communist Party by members of its reform wing, most prominently by Politburo member Imre Pozsgay. At a meeting of the party's Central Committee last weekend, Pozsgay was nominated to become the country's new state President as soon as constitutional changes imbue that office with real power. The party's other leading reformer, Rezso Nyers, was tapped as party chairman. The moves diluted the power of General Secretary Karoly Grosz, who until...