Word: communistically
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...determined challenge, delivered Friday by Ronald Reagan with his back to the Berlin Wall, across from the Brandenburg Gate in Communist East Germany. But the necessity the President felt to remind West Berliners, of all people, that the Soviet leader still commands a totalitarian society underscored a melancholy aspect of Reagan's nine-day journey through Western Europe. For all his eloquence, the aging President was repeatedly upstaged by the youthful and suavely dynamic image of the man who was not there: Mikhail Gorbachev...
When Reagan met with the leaders of the non-Communist world's seven principal industrial powers last week in Venice, almost the entire opening dinner was taken up by an animated -- and inconclusive -- discussion of Gorbachev's arms-control maneuvers and campaign for glasnost (openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring) within the Soviet Union. At a press conference after the summit, a reporter reminded the President of polls showing that West Europeans put more faith in Gorbachev than in Reagan as a leader working for peace. Reagan replied, correctly, that the prospective agreement to rid Europe of intermediate-range nuclear missiles...
...While Bush can be sure of a rapturous welcome in Tirana, the same is no longer true of all post-communist European countries, including some others on his current itinerary. In the Czech Republic, more than 60% of citizens are against his missile defense initiative, not because they agree with Moscow (which has also, loudly, opposed the plan) but because they fear being dragged into another superpower slugfest. Surprisingly, Czechs view Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, more highly than they do Bush, although polls show they still would prefer the U.S. as a neighbor...
...failure of the U.S. to grant visa-free travel to eastern Europeans-their fellow E.U.-members in France and Germany can enter American borders freely-is another sore point. Bush has used his eastern European visits to trumpet a "freedom agenda," correctly asserting that, with their recent experiences under communist tyranny, eastern Europeans share his goal of spreading democracy around the world. But for now, the Albanians are the only ones supporting it in the streets...
Since the beginning of that war, a new élite--the siloviki from the FSB (the renamed KGB) and the subservient new economic oligarchs--has come to dominate policymaking under Putin's control. This new élite embraces a strident nationalism as a substitute for communist ideology while engaging in thinly veiled acts of violence against political dissenters. Putin almost sneeringly dismissed the murder of a leading Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, who exposed crimes against the Chechens. Similarly, troubling British evidence of Russian involvement in the London murder of an outspoken FSB defector produced little more than official Russian ridicule...