Word: east
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Shevardnadze spoke approvingly last week of the political upheavals in Eastern Europe, maintaining that each country has "absolute freedom of choice." But what if ethnic or nationalist rivalries erupt? Suppose Soviet and East European notions of reform become incompatible? What if, for instance, Hungary or Poland should choose to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact? "We keep thinking that Hungary, Poland and East Germany have hit the threshold of Soviet forbearance," says David Ratford, a Soviet and East European expert in the British Foreign Office. "We are at a loss to explain how the threshold has been moved time and time...
...answer is that significant reform is in the interests of the Soviet Union. It frees 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...
Perhaps Gorbachev is hoping that the East Europeans will show him the way out of his own domestic morass. If so, he may be disappointed. The key ingredients for change in the Communist world are already well identified, the recipe lifted from a Western cookbook for democracy. Separate Party from State. Add opposition parties and free elections to State. Briskly mix in press, speech and travel freedoms. Top with rights to assemble, strike and form labor unions. Bake in oven turned to Free Enterprise setting. Then hope that the inevitable spillover of chaos -- including the inevitable hard economic times -- doesn...
Moreover, the reformers must work with ingredients that have grown stale. Every East European nation faces to some extent a similar litany of consumer complaints: food and fuel shortages, inadequate salaries that are declining in purchasing power, massive budget deficits. It presumes a lot to think that East Europeans will sit quietly through the price hikes, plant closings, job layoffs and other austerity measures ahead. "It's a race against time," says Dominique Moisi, deputy director of the French Institute for International Relations. "Can the democratization of politics beat the Third-Worldization of their economies...
...each country sets about easing central economic controls, new tensions appear. Since the 1950s, the Moscow-based Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, known as Comecon, has brokered the bulk of East bloc trade. Comecon encourages individual countries to specialize in the manufacture of specific goods and sets production goals to meet the bloc's needs and those of other members, including Cuba and Viet Nam. Since all trade is accounted for in rubles, Comecon has built a wall around itself that promotes inefficiency and the production of shoddy goods...