Word: harshly
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...present Communist Party and state leadership will not permit the breakup of the federal state." With that harsh comment on the Lithuanian party's decision to break with Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev laid down the limit on Soviet political reform. After months of acquiescence while communist parties across Eastern Europe went their own way, Gorbachev made it clear that a similar move by any of the 15 republics of the U.S.S.R. would be considered "illegitimate." No group had yet dared to defy Moscow in this way, and Gorbachev let his anger show. "If we cross this line," he declared...
...Soviets themselves now look back on the almost two decades of Leonid Brezhnev's rule as the era of "stagnation." Harsh as that word sounds, it is actually a euphemism; it really means general decline. Gorbachev personifies to his own people, and should personify to the outside world, a damning revelation about Soviet history: Russia made a huge mistake at the beginning of the 20th century, one that it is trying to correct as it prepares to enter the 21st. Having already missed out on what the 18th and 19th centuries offered in the way of modernity, including much...
...Pitch yourselves," says a white man calling himself Mr. Swart, who serves as half warder, half butler. "Mr. Mandela will not be long." Swart was once a guard on Robben Island, where Mandela was imprisoned under harsh conditions for nearly two decades...
...Enough has happened that it warrants a look," says Congressman Bates. The San Diego hearing documented an unduly harsh, arbitrary management style. Witnesses told of the police being summoned to a San Diego suburb to settle one of the nearly daily disputes over the load in each carrier's bag. A study showed that 45% of the 837 carrier routes in San Diego require more than an eight-hour shift to complete. Taking time off for surgery or unapproved nose blowing is a punishable act. "There's a rule for everything," testified a San Diego shop steward. "If a supervisor...
...Soviet party leader has had his share of bruises lately. He was apparently so angered by the harsh criticisms he heard at the Central Committee plenum two weeks ago that he threatened to resign. Gorbachev has played this trump card on at least two other occasions to rally support. But this time the conservative onslaught was especially fierce, particularly from Alexander Melnikov, party boss from the Siberian city of Kemerovo, one of the sites of coal-mining strikes that swept the nation last July. In an article in the liberal weekly Moscow News, journalist Danil Granin, who was a guest...