Word: east-west
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...enough hard facts to support his thesis. As in the past, he is a master of the conditional assertion ("This would be added evidence ..."). Unfortunately, the approximately four-century history of Khazaria is thin in primary source material. The kingdom seems to have flourished as a crossroads of East-West trade. Persecuted Jews from Byzantium are believed to have flocked to Khazaria, where they intermarried with their Caucasian coreligionists. When Genghis Khan's Mongols swept westward in the 13th century, Khazaria's Jews fled to Eastern and Central Europe. These fugitives, Koestler suggests, were part of a second...
...capital of Finland one year ago this week to sign a document that a small army of negotiators had taken two years to prepare. Today the vaunted Helsinki agreement remains what it was from the start: more ceremony than substance. There has been so little improvement in East-West relations that can be credited to the accord that the spirit of Helsinki has become increasingly dispirited...
...return for the West's ratification of Soviet post-1945 territorial gains, Moscow and its allies had to pledge, among other things, increased East-West cultural and human contacts. Cultural exchanges have indeed burgeoned, as measured by the rising East-West traffic in groups involved in sports, art and other fields, and tourism within the Soviet Union is being expanded. But Western scorekeepers fault the Soviets in other areas, notably human rights, including the treatment of political dissidents and would-be emigrants. Although the Kremlin has cut the price of emigration visas by onefourth, to 300 rubles...
That reflects what many regard as the Helsinki accord's main value: as a yardstick for measuring East-West relations, and thus part of the process of refining them. The accord's clearest failing has been its inability to bring East and West any closer to reducing or limiting their levels of armaments. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, for example, have been almost completely deadlocked since President Gerald Ford and Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev met at Vladivostock in November 1974. There also has been little progress in the three-year-old Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR...
Some British theorists think that the Russians intend the new ships to serve an anticipated boom in East-West trade. The most popular explanation for the shipbuilding surge, though, reflects cold-war logic. The Soviets want the hard currency that their shipping industry can earn-especially U.S. dollars and West German marks-and the prestige that can come from showing the red flag around the world. Adds Karl-Heinz Sager, deputy chairman of Hamburg's Hapag-Lloyd shippers: "The Russians are also learning a great deal about the flows of trade and kinds of goods. That kind of information...