Word: communists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hundreds of meetings across the country, including Communist Party gatherings, people poured out their disgust, demanding that their former leaders be investigated and, if necessary, tried and punished. Inevitably, perhaps, the time for retribution had come. During one of the almost nightly mass rallies in Leipzig, the mood was summed up by a young speaker who condemned the regime, shouting "You treated us like a herd of cattle...
Wendehals literally means turn neck, the name of a rare bird that can twist its head 180 degrees; the word has been adopted by East Germans to refer to the thousands of Communist Party officials, from Egon Krenz, the current party leader, down to district secretaries, who overnight began to sound as if they had joined the pro-democracy movement. A favorite target is Gunter Mittag, the recently sacked Politburo member in charge of the economy. Described by the newly outspoken East German press as arrogant and autocratic, Mittag is being held responsible for wrecking the economy and cooking...
...push for change for a few weeks." Krenz said he was ready for an "unsparing investigation" of the party's mistakes and transgressions. He and the beleaguered Politburo also took a first step toward some form of power-sharing by proposing round-table talks on reform with non-Communist parties and legal opposition groups; the agenda would include changing the constitution, which currently gives the Communists the monopoly of power...
...outflow of East German marks, carried out by citizens who at last could use them, even at absurdly low rates, to buy something -- in the West. Fretted Prime Minister Modrow: "East Germany must not become a nation of speculators." The government's bewilderment underlined the problems encountered by a Communist leadership, albeit a reform-minded one, in coming face to face with the complexities of capitalism. Within a matter of days, the East German currency -- officially at parity with the deutsche mark -- fell to one-twentieth of its denominated value. One result is that foreigners as well as East Germans...
...Stalin at Potsdam and hung tough over Iran, Berlin and Korea, but he still ended up being pilloried by a couple of junior Senators named Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. It was Nixon who called Truman's Secretary of State the dean of the "cowardly college of Communist containment." Two decades later, the New Nixon's policy of detente ran into a buzz saw of bipartisan anti-Soviet opposition. When a Watergate-wounded Nixon went to see Leonid Brezhnev in the Crimea in 1974, he refused to visit Yalta nearby, lest anyone accuse him of another giveaway...