Word: easterners
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...invasions, national security has long been defined as the control of territory and the subjugation of neighbors. Moscow's desire for a protective buffer, combined with a thousand- year legacy of expansionism and a 20th century overlay of missionary Marxism, was what prompted Stalin to leave his army in Eastern Europe after World War II and impose puppet regimes in the nations he had liberated...
This Soviet quest for security necessarily meant insecurity for others. It also, as it turned out, meant the same for the Soviets. "One irony of history is that the security zone in Eastern Europe that Stalin created turned out to be one of the greatest imaginable sources of insecurity," says Princeton Professor Stephen Cohen, co-author of Voices of Glasnost. It precipitated the cold war, provoked an armed competition with the West and saddled the Soviets with a string of costly and cranky vassals...
Thus it was understandable, perhaps even inevitable, that Soviet control over Eastern Europe would erode and its territorial approach to security be exposed as obsolete in a world of nuclear missiles. Yet even years from now, when the breathtaking events of 1989 are assessed, hindsight is unlikely to dilute the amazement of the moment. For suddenly, amid a barrage of headlines that a year ago would have seemed unimaginable, the architecture of Europe is being redrawn and the structure of international relations transformed by Mikhail Gorbachev's redefinition of Soviet security...
...These changes we're seeing in Eastern Europe are absolutely extraordinary," George Bush told the New York Times last week. In fact, 1989 will be remembered not as the year that Eastern Europe changed but as the year that Eastern Europe as we have known it for four decades ended. The concept was always an artificial one: a handful of diverse nations suddenly iron- curtained off from their neighbors and force-fed an unwanted ideology. Soviet dominion over the region may someday be regarded as a parenthetical pause (1945-89) that left economic scars but had little permanent impact...
When Gorbachev first spoke of "new thinking" in foreign policy, many in the West -- especially in the U.S. -- doubted his sincerity. The real test was whether Gorbachev would end the policy at the heart of the cold war: the subjugation of Eastern Europe. At the end of last year, in a speech at the United Nations, Gorbachev declared that he would. "Freedom of choice is a universal principle," he said. Yet the doubts lingered. They always seemed to come down to the question: Is Gorbachev for real...