Word: curtain
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...smugness of Czechoslovaks may stem from the fact that, along with Hungarians, they are relatively free to travel. Not so for others: although the Iron Curtain has crumbled along the entire length of the old East-West divide, many East Europeans find their freedom of movement as curtailed as ever. It is no longer a question of obtaining a passport and an exit permit from a suspicious communist regime. Now the problem for Poles, Bulgarians and Romanians is to obtain visas to the West or even permits to visit one of the other countries in Eastern Europe. Says Andrzej Misiok...
...cold war was near absolute zero, the Korean War was raging, and the West could almost hear the Soviet tanks gunning their engines on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The U.S. and its European allies were determined not to be caught as unprepared as they had been when the Nazis invaded. So in the early 1950s they began training "stay behind" networks of volunteers. If the Soviet army rolled west, the groups were to gather intelligence, open escape routes and form resistance movements...
...major issues that were supposed to matter vanished behind the voting-booth curtain. By and large, incumbents won, hypocrites lost, ballot initiatives, worthy or not, were voted down, and two-thirds of those eligible to vote stayed home. Though both parties found something to celebrate, the Democrats fared better in preparing for the redistricting of House seats. Neither party emerged with a clear mandate to carry it to 1992 -- and George Bush turned out to be vulnerable after...
Considering how generally disputatious the campaign has been, it isn't surprising that crowds will flock to the voting booths tomorrow. What is surprising is that a large group of these voters may not be able come to a decision until they pull the voting booth curtain closed behind them...
...formidable reconstruction. It will take years of effort to repair the damage caused by division and, in the East, by four decades of communism. It will mean putting the East's downtrodden economy into working order and soothing worries on both sides of the old Iron Curtain: those of West Germans about paying for unity's immense costs and those of former Easterners about being second-class citizens in the united country...