Word: communists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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George Bush normally distrusts "big moments," and this one did not last long. His chummy session with Mikhail Gorbachev in Malta restored momentum to U.S.-Soviet relations and gave a boost to what Bush called his "new thinking" about the changes in the Communist world. Yet the President had barely left his joint press conference with Gorbachev when he encountered serious questions about his plans to encourage perestroika and to deliver on his promises in time...
East Germany's Communist Party granted the ultimate concession when its leader, Egon Krenz, and the other nine members of the Politburo resigned last week, along with the entire 163-member Central Committee. Three days later, Krenz stepped down as head of state, a move that left him stripped of the powers he had inherited only a month and a half earlier from his discredited predecessor, Erich Honecker. Manfred Gerlach, who heads a small party until now bound to the Communists, was named to replace Krenz in the ceremonial post of President. Honecker meanwhile was in quick succession expelled from...
...uneasy sense that no one was in charge. But Prime Minister Hans Modrow seemed in command as he appealed on national television for calm, and the party hastily threw together a temporary 25-member working group to fill the leadership void. On Thursday the first talks between the Communist Party and the opposition yielded agreements to recommend parliamentary elections for May 6 and to rewrite the constitution. In addition, the foundering party advanced an emergency congress by a week to try to restore order and salvage shreds of credibility from the wreckage...
Meeting at East Berlin's Dynamo Football Club Gymnasium, the 2,714 delegates overwhelmingly nominated as party leader Gregor Gysi, a reformist lawyer who at 41 becomes the youngest Communist boss in Eastern Europe. Only three months ago, Gysi came under withering attack by hard-liners for representing the opposition group New Forum in its bid for legal status. Now, said Gysi after winning election, the Communists in East Germany will be merely "one party among others...
Meanwhile, Mikhail Gorbachev is confronting a political crisis as the reforms he inspired in Eastern Europe begin to haunt him at home. With Gorbachev's tacit blessing, East Germany and Czechoslovakia have joined Hungary and Poland in abolishing the Communist Party's constitutional monopoly on power. Nonetheless, the Soviet leader has always insisted that the party must retain its pre-eminence in his country if perestroika is to succeed. Last week the Lithuanian legislature defied Gorbachev's wishes and legalized rival political parties, setting the stage for other Soviet republics to do the same. This week radical delegates are expected...