Word: east
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Settling for Less. As many people, including President Nixon, had expected, the Soviets had obviously refused to allow the bellicose East Germans to create a crisis that would have jeopardized Russian hopes of holding talks about arms controls with the new U.S. Ad ministration. As part of his campaign against any political ties between West Germany and West Berlin, East Germany's Stalinist Boss Walter Ulbricht had wanted to clamp on a full-scale land blockade and to harass Allied air liners that carried the West German electors into the isolated city...
...Soviets made Ulbricht settle for much less than that. Though some 250,000 East German and Soviet troops took part in maneuvers near West Ber lin's road, rail and canal routes to the West, only road traffic came in for serious harassment. On eight occasions in seven days East German soldiers blocked the access highways for two or three hours; Soviet officers explained that Communist tanks were using the roads...
...Moscow of Soviet Marshal Ivan Yakubovsky, the Warsaw Pact commander who personally directed the exercises, the maneuvers and perhaps also the delays seemed about to end. In Moscow, Soviet officials insisted that Yakubovsky, whose travels in the past have some times presaged Soviet pressures, had been sent to East Berlin this time only in order to keep the East Germans in line. Still, a lingering fear remained among West Germans and West Berliners that the Communists would use their new charge about illegal armament production in the city to selectively harass freight traffic from West Berlin...
...East Germans have turned back only one truck, whose "military goods" consisted of belts, buckles and shoulder straps manufactured by a firm that makes accessories for firemen...
EVEN as the Soviets and East Germans sought to stop the West Germans from holding the presidential election in West Berlin, the West Germans selected the man whom the Communists wanted perhaps least to see as the Federal Republic's new chief of state. The reason: the President-elect's record on German reunification and antimilitarism is so impeccable that East German propagandists are likely to find themselves at a rare total loss for nasty words...