Word: grips
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...open the way for distribution of Havel's essays and plays, which are often likened to the absurdist works of Ionesco and Beckett. What Czechoslovaks will discover is a painstaking attention to the elaborate web of falsification that for so long enabled a despised leadership to maintain its grip. Havel's work depicts the idiocy of entrenched bureaucracies and the power of language to twist and distort ideas. It also highlights the unwitting complicity of ordinary citizens in the maintenance of totalitarian regimes. "Everyone is in fact involved and enslaved," Havel once told TIME. "Each person is capable...
Despite Bush's sweeping rhetoric, his closest advisers predict that he will stick to the cautious script he has followed since Hungary, Poland, East Germany and most recently Czechoslovakia began loosening the grip of Communist repression. But the President was dropping hints that if the chemistry is right, then maybe -- just maybe -- the meeting in Malta could go beyond the modest get-acquainted session he originally envisioned. He dangled that possibility in his televised speech. While stressing that the meeting "will not be a time for detailed arms-control negotiations" and that "there will be no surprises sprung...
...could the steely Dukakis so lose his grip? Some say it took him months to get over the guilt of waging so flimsy a campaign. Others found confirmation of longstanding misgivings about Dukakis, the odd and uncomfortable politician so pathetically incapable of relating to others. Example: never did he speak about his presidential defeat in a personal way to Massachusetts voters who were so stirred by his candidacy. They came to resent that...
...Once unified by Moscow's tight grip, the countries of Eastern Europe are breaking free unevenly. Poland and Hungary lead the way, East Germany is groping to catch up, and Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Rumania remain far behind. As the participants -- even Gorbachev -- improvise from one day to the next, old alliances are being strained. "Almost overnight," says Adam Bromke of the Polish Academy of Sciences, "all the rivalries and tensions in the bloc that Communist orthodoxy had papered over for decades burst into the open...
COVER: As Gorbachev relaxes his grip on Eastern Europe, he proves once and for all that he seeks a different world...