Word: eastern
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Shouting Match. The revival of the bloc system brought scant comfort to one country that is perilously caught both geographically and ideologically between the two blocs. It is Yugoslavia, whose President, Marshal Josip Broz Tito, not only was the first Eastern European ruler to achieve his independence from the Soviet overlordship but also served as an inspiration to Czechoslovak Party First Secretary Alexander Dubcek in his ill-starred search to find a measure of freedom within Communism. The recent Soviet press campaign against Tito ("lover of counter-revolution") and his country is almost as bitter as the one against West...
...political and economic policies, the Soviets kicked Tito out of the world Communist movement. In an effort to discredit him at home, the Soviets unleashed vitriolic propaganda attacks against him. They sought to intimidate the Yugoslavs by instigating some 1,500 incidents along the country's eastern border. Stalin sent Tito a letter containing a threat that he has not forgotten. "We think Trotsky's political career is sufficiently instructive as a reminder," it read. The allusion, of course, was to the 1940 assassination of Stalin's old rival in Mexico by Soviet agents...
...with the East bloc. But at that time, East German Boss Walter Ulbricht stonewalled Brandt's plan by ordering West German Reds to stay underground. Ulbricht feared that the West German diplomatic initiatives would isolate his unpopular satrapy; therefore he wanted to be able to denounce Bonn throughout Eastern Europe by pointing out the Federal Republic's "persecution" of Communists at home...
...that the Soviets have effectively halted, at least for the present, Bonn's diplomatic and economic penetration into Eastern Europe, Ulbricht has cleverly seized upon West Germany's earlier permissive attitude to set up a new party. By so doing, he and his Soviet superiors have accomplished two important goals: they have 1) founded a new, hard-lining party in Western Europe at a time when the major Western European parties have split with Moscow over the Czechoslovak invasion, and 2) created an instrument for stirring up political strife in the Federal Republic...
...compulsive self-analysis that has characterized his other work, he re-creates in the November Harper's the events, personalities and mood of Miami Beach and Chicago. His reporting is, as always, intensely personal as it probes the darker, unexplored passageways of American political life. But Mailer - Eastern Seaboard exotic, alienated artist, New York practitioner of improvisational cinema - is strangely in touch with heartland America this election year. His own surprisingly shifting views of civil rights and Negroes, of WASPS and Nixon seem to reflect the national mood...