Word: kremlins
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...setting was new: at the geographical and political center of the Communist world. This time it was not in Prague, Budapest or Leipzig but in Moscow that citizens thronged the streets with banners that could be loosely translated THROW THE BUMS OUT! This time it was in the Kremlin that the bums themselves seemed to take heed and the custodians of absolute power began the process of giving it up. And this time Mikhail Sergeyevich, the Commissar Liberator, was not somewhere over the horizon, letting it all happen. He was on the podium, making it happen...
...conventional wisdom was promulgated by Kremlin and Kremlinologists alike. Yes, Gorbachev had created the conditions for the end of one-party rule in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria by putting the regimes there on notice that they were on their own. But no, he could not, would not and probably should not give up the Communist monopoly in his own country...
...what it means to him? For some time there has been reason to wonder whether, in the 3 o'clock in the morning of his soul, Mikhail Sergeyevich really is a Communist, or at least, in the Soviet sense, a "good" Communist. Certainly many in his audience at the Kremlin were worrying about that last week. Glasnost is an unabashedly antimonopolistic, antitotalitarian, therefore anti-Communist notion. Calling for a "revolution of the mind" before his meeting with the Pope in December, Gorbachev said, "We no longer think that we are the best and are always right, that those who disagree...
Just since January, John has reported on the secessionist movement in Lithuania, civil war in the Caucasus, thousands of Soviets marching on the Kremlin, and the abdication of the Communist Party. Sipping tea one evening last week, he and some Russian friends agreed that the history unfolding around them matched that of the revolutions...
...sharply, in fact, that within three days the Kremlin began to hem and haw. Apparently concerned that Gorbachev's words might be interpreted as an explicit push for a single German state, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze told Soviet reporters that "it is not the idea of German unity itself but the revival of sinister shadows of the past" that raises alarm. He proposed that some way be found for the citizens of the Soviet Union, Europe, the U.S. and Canada to express their opinions on unification...