Word: czechoslovakia
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Flight through Czechoslovakia continued and people who stayed behind said they were unimpressed by reforms introduced by Egon Krenz, the president and Communist Party chief who last month replaced his hard-line mentor, Erich Honecker...
East Germans poured into Czechoslovakia aftertheir government lifted a month-old ban on travelto the neighboring Warsaw Pact ally, still theonly nation East Germans can visit withoutofficial permission...
...Once unified by Moscow's tight grip, the countries of Eastern Europe are breaking free unevenly. Poland and Hungary lead the way, East Germany is groping to catch up, and Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Rumania remain far behind. As the participants -- even Gorbachev -- improvise from one day to the next, old alliances are being strained. "Almost overnight," says Adam Bromke of the Polish Academy of Sciences, "all the rivalries and tensions in the bloc that Communist orthodoxy had papered over for decades burst into the open...
...Moscow from expensive policing operations and could head off, in Eastern Europe, the sort of protests that plague many of the Soviet republics. East Europeans are far less concerned about a Moscow-initiated crackdown than about a heavy-handed backlash from within the bloc. So is Mikhail Gorbachev. If Czechoslovakia were to launch an anti-opposition campaign, warns Bromke, "it would undermine Gorbachev's prestige at home and in the bloc and make it more difficult for him internationally...
Though the U.S. and the Soviet Union might prefer to ignore the issue, Europeans are more visibly concerned. "The whole question," warns Bromke, "could conceivably slip out of everyone's hands but the Germans'." Czechoslovakia's Doudera puts the problem in even starker terms. "All of Germany's neighbors have got to be against reunification," he says. "Once East and West Germany have been unified, what is to stop the Germans from wanting to get back all their old lands in the east, from Pomerania to Silesia and Sudetenland...