Word: gorbachevized
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...Milos Jakes, the beginning of the end came early last summer. In a series of private exchanges between the Czechoslovak Communist Party leader and Mikhail Gorbachev and his advisers, the Soviet President made clear that his own internal situation demanded a repudiation of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. If Jakes, 67, did not want to be undercut by the Soviet move, he would have to act -- and act soon. An agreement between Moscow and Prague was struck. Come October, Jakes would convene a Central Committee meeting and expel all Politburo members tainted by the 1968 invasion -- except himself. After appointing...
There was only one problem: Jakes reneged on his agreement with Gorbachev. That extraordinary double cross began the unraveling of Jakes's two-year rule. Through a variety of sources, TIME has pieced together an account of the final days of the repressive Jakes regime. It is not a sympathetic tale; in the end, Jakes had only his own poor judgment, panic and stubbornness to blame...
...long after, agreement between Gorbachev and Jakes was reached on the plan for a Politburo purge. But October came and went with nothing done. In mid-November, hard-line ideology chief Jan Fojtik traveled on short notice to Moscow, where he met with Georgi Smirnov, chief of the Moscow Institute of Marxism-Leninism. Smirnov said that a document condemning the 1968 invasion had been approved by the Soviet Politburo, and he warned that with the Malta summit approaching, the document would soon be published...
...Urbanek, it turned out, was a closet Strougal partisan determined to finish the housecleaning. In communication with Gorbachev, he pledged to carry out the party rehabilitations that Jakes had reneged on. Then Urbanek clinched a deal in which key figures among those expelled from the party 21 years ago refused to rejoin until the last hard-liners were thrown out of the Politburo. On Nov. 26 Urbanek reconvened the Central Committee and secured the resignations of Stepan, Zavadil and Lenart. The purge was complete...
...Mikhail Gorbachev may yet pull everybody back to square one, by changing his mind or getting the sack. Even if he stays on his present course, he will remain the ruler of a big country with large arsenals. There is enough history ahead for all but the most jaded. Once the malign magnetic field that held us with such power breaks, however, conservatives will have to find new ways to meet history. "Most of us," wrote political philosopher Kenneth R. Minogue in 1963, "are, in some degree or other, liberal. It is only the very cynical, the unassailably religious...