Word: eastern
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...last week from ev ery available vantage point. In Prague itself, Peter Forbath, who has been reporting on the crisis from the beginning, was joined by Friedel Ungeheuer, who hardly had time to unpack after his previous assignment: the Nigerian civil war. London Bureau Chief Jim Bell, an old Eastern Europe hand, toured the tight Austrian-Czech frontier to interview scores of refugees, and Stringers Bob Kroon, Eva Stichova and Christian Schwinner all pitched in at the Vienna bureau. As tension mounted in nearby Rumania, Correspondent Bob Ball reported from Bucharest...
...that has changed in the world situation is the escapist willingness of American leadership to believe that the nature of Communism could be anything but Communist, i.e., aggressive, imperialist, and monopolists of "the truth." It has been basically the same people who have been engaging in wishful thinking about Eastern Europe who have been opposed to our Viet Nam commitment to defend a beleaguered people from just such Communist tyranny. They have been unwilling to see the logical extensions of our commitments, and they foster the illusion that the Soviet Union has an interest in a peaceful settlement...
...possibility, had seemed unlikely. After all, it was 15 years after Stalin's death, twelve years after Hungary. The West had come to accept the "new maturity" of Russia's leaders. The relative liberalization of Soviet society and the increasing autonomy of Moscow's erstwhile satellites in Eastern Europe had also been taken for granted as an irreversible reaction to the harsh rigidities of the Stalinist past. The softening of Communism ("They are getting more like us, and we are getting more like them") had become one of the dubiously hopeful cliches of the day. In one brutal night...
...about the invasion is that, far from strengthening Soviet-style Communism, Moscow has further crippled it. Acting on the flimsiest and most cynical of pretexts, Warsaw Pact troops throttled the infant independence of a state that had reiterated its fidelity to Moscow and Communism. To retain its grip on Eastern Europe?perhaps only for a few years more?the Soviet Union had sacrificed much of its influence among Communist parties elsewhere. Not since the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 had the Kremlin acted so palpably from fear and weakness. Under present-day conditions, Moscow's treatment of Prague makes...
...answer will not be clear until it is known whether the invasion was caused by or will be followed by a power shift inside the Kremlin. But the chances are that Moscow's blow was aimed entirely at restoring order inside Russia's Eastern European domain?as the Soviets were careful to point out?and is not necessarily a sign of all-round aggressiveness against the rest of the world. On the contrary, it is possible that the move has so weakened Russia's prestige and so strained its relations with other Communist parties that adventures elsewhere are the last...