Word: crackdowns
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...pretending that Lithuania's demands to secede from the union were an isolated appeal. If the nation is divided over issues of language, culture, politics and religion, it is united in its dissatisfaction with economic problems. As goes Lithuania, so might go other republics -- thus inviting a military crackdown and destroying perestroika. "If even the slightest suppression occurs, or a misunderstanding, say, in Estonia or Moldavia," Gorbachev warned, "it spills over to the rest of the country...
Chinese students have criticized Bush for not taking a harder line with the Beijing government after its bloody crackdown on the pro-democracy movement last year. They point to recent visits to China by National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and the cancellation of sanctions as evidence that the administration is willing to forget China's human rights violations...
...freeze again in the intensified cold war that followed the Cuban missile crisis. Alexei Kosygin, who was Prime Minister until his death in 1980, attempted to reorient heavy industry toward consumer goods, decentralization and profitmaking in the mid-1960s. But, ironically, that program was aborted partly because the Soviet crackdown on "socialism with a human face" in Czechoslovakia triggered a backlash against liberalism in the U.S.S.R. In Poland the creation of Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc, preceded the advent of Gorbachev by five years. But Lech Walesa was officially considered an outlaw. The notion...
...every case -- Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia -- a disbelieving but increasingly hopeful world watched and waited for a crackdown that never came. In every case, the disintegration of the communist system was hastened by economic crises. Marx was right: politics is driven by economics. But his 20th century followers were spectacularly wrong. A command economy can grow only by exploiting farmers and workers; eventually there is no incentive for the workers to work or the farmers to farm in a society in which they have no say in the allocation of resources. Giving them a say means giving them...
...dares not permit violent chaos to spread, nor preside over the breakup of the U.S.S.R. On the other, he knows that resorting to force would probably provoke even greater resistance to Moscow's rule and would certainly spell the end of his liberal reform program as a whole. A crackdown could also revive the cold war and end his plans to transfer resources from the military to the civilian sector...