Word: hungarians
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...pastor of the Hungarian Reformed Church in the Transylvanian city of & Timisoara, the Rev. Laszlo Tokes seemed an unlikely figure to spark a revolution. But Tokes, 37, possessed a sharp tongue at a time when that attribute was rare in Rumania. Not only did he lash out against the tyrannical regime in Bucharest, but he even accused Hungarian Reformed Church leaders of collaborating with communist authorities...
...cause aroused Tokes's wrath more than the plight of his fellow 1.7 million ethnic Hungarians, who make up 8% of the Rumanian population and are concentrated in Transylvania, the country's westernmost region. Long a center of ethnic turbulence, Transylvania passed from Hungary to Rumania in 1918, after World War I. The region reverted to Hungary in 1940, and was ceded back to Rumania in 1944. Ethnic Hungarian leaders charge Bucharest with attempting "cultural genocide" by shutting ethnic schools, dissolving Hungarian communities and seizing historical archives. Some 18,000 ethnic Hungarians fled Rumania last year...
Tokes ran afoul of authorities last August in an outspoken interview with Hungarian television. Among other things, he attacked Bucharest's plan to raze up to 8,000 villages and resettle their residents in high-rise apartment complexes. Some 50,000 ethnic Hungarians would be relocated in the program, which has brought denunciations from international human rights groups and strained relations with the Budapest government...
...require Ceausescu's permission to enter Rumania. The country's 23 million citizens had a long list of grievances, from shortages of - food and fuel to crushing boredom, but the proximate cause of the civil explosion was the Securitate. When its officers tried to arrest an ethnic Hungarian clergyman in the western city of Timisoara (pop. 309,000) for his outspoken opposition to the government and to the policies of his own Hungarian Reformed Church, a vigil outside his house erupted into an antiregime riot. Angry mobs smashed shopwindows, burned Ceausescu's books and portraits, and besieged party headquarters...
...like Fidel Castro's Cuba or Najibullah's Afghanistan would probably wither quickly, as might many Third World Communist insurgencies. The U.S. economy would benefit handsomely from vastly reduced defense expenditures. But the blessings of a Soviet collapse would certainly be mixed. Just as the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I led to Hitler's brutal exploitation of the resulting power vacuum, so the end of the Pax Sovietica in Eurasia might touch off an ethnic bloodbath among the squabbling successor regimes. For University of Alabama historian Hugh Ragsdale, a Soviet collapse would lead...