Word: east
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Whole segments of the East bloc, once firmly under the thumb of Soviet orthodoxy, are launched in headlong pursuit of a new political and economic order. But not all. In Bulgaria an aging leadership shows no sign of interest in homegrown perestroika. In Czechoslovakia, where leading dissident Vaclav Havel has been sentenced to jail, trials moved into a second month for other activists held on charges ranging from organizing peaceful antigovernment demonstrations to signing political petitions. And in Stalinist Rumania, party leader Nicolae Ceausescu remains the "Idi Amin of Communism," as his neighbors call him. The unregenerate totalitarian, obsessed with...
...since Stalin slammed down the Iron Curtain four decades ago has Europe witnessed such ferment east of the Elbe as that unleashed by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's campaign to reshape socialist politics and economics. In the past, when opposition escalated, the Kremlin dispatched tanks and troops to crush dissent. But since coming to power in 1985, Gorbachev himself has been the chief dissident, leading the assault on the status quo. Acknowledging that there is no "binding model" for socialism, he has encouraged pluri- Communism in Eastern Europe...
...cracks that have opened both within Eastern Europe and between the East and its master in Moscow emerge two crucial questions demanding urgent answers...
Some Europeans fear the rate of change in the East may outpace their ability to construct coherent policies in response. Says a senior adviser to French President Francois Mitterrand: "Eastern Europe could become a region of instability and risk." But others scent something better: the possible end to the cold war, on which virtually all East-West security planning is based. "This is the greatest opportunity the West has had to influence this region since the division of Europe after World War II," said Mark Palmer, the U.S. Ambassador to Hungary and a leading advocate of Western activism. "We simply...
...comprehensive vision. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, an influential figure among Bush Republicans, has argued that Washington and Moscow should directly negotiate the future of Eastern Europe at a kind of "Yalta Two," a latter-day reprise of the much criticized wartime agreement that cemented the East-West division of Europe. Moscow would agree to tolerate hitherto unprecedented political and economic liberalism in the East and would renounce the Brezhnev Doctrine. In return, the West would assent to the "legitimate" Soviet security interests there, including the implicit promise not to seek the reunification of Germany or pursue any other...