Word: czechoslovakias
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...CZECHOSLOVAKIA...
...despots lose the special combination of visible authority and legitimacy that the Chinese call "the mandate of heaven." In 1989 it happened all over Eastern Europe, where the accelerating pace of reforms gave birth to the observation that Poland took ten years, Hungary ten months, East Germany ten weeks, Czechoslovakia ten days...
...country's new political leadership is likely to rise from ad hoc coalitions of intellectuals, students and workers similar to the Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia and the New Forum in East Germany. In Bucharest a group called the Front for National Salvation announced that it was assuming power. The organization is headed by Corneliu Manescu, a former Foreign Minister, who said he would act as President until free elections are held in the spring. Once a confidant of Ceausescu's, Manescu, 73, had a falling-out with the President during the 1970s, and has been banished to an apartment outside...
...back them up. But then Ceausescu for many years had set himself apart from his East bloc brethren. He was cheered by the West as the "maverick" of the Pact and praised for his refusal to allow Soviet troops on his soil, to participate in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 or to support the Soviet war in Afghanistan...
...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 of Solidarity participating in government, not to mention dominating...