Word: leader
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...nation's leadership often hears what it wants to hear, but few have seemed quite so deaf to the public's demands as East Germany's rulers. Thousands flee the country, protesters stage hunger strikes in churches, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev offers a gentle lecture in person -- none of it seemed to make a difference. But last week as the cries for democratic reform reached a crescendo in cities across East Germany, the leaders in East Berlin demonstrated that their hearing faculties were intact -- and that they were distressed by the rising noise level...
...technically illegal, it has gathered the signatures of more than 20,000 adherents, ranging from teachers and train drivers to electricians and factory foremen. Unlike Poland, where union workers sparked a popular insurrection, no single sector of society fuels the unrest in East Germany. The dissenters lack both a leader with Lech Walesa's charisma and a specific agenda...
Such concessions were too much for some of the party's hard-liners. They set about forming their own political groups, each claiming to represent the ideals of the old Communist Party. "We will soldier on as a Communist Party," said Roland Antoniewicz, leader of the Janos Kadar Society, one newborn hard-line splinter named after the party's longtime leader who died in July...
...party may not have gone far enough -- for its own sake or for the sake of most Hungarians. "This is just a new label on an old bottle," complains Gyorgy Ruttner, an opposition leader who heads the Social Democratic Party. Aware that the bottle's contents might seem familiar and sour, the more radical reformers among the Communists wanted an even sharper break with the past, including expulsion of Old Guard hard-liners. In the end, moderates led by Rezso Nyers, 66, who was elected party president, stitched together a compromise that held the party together but may jeopardize...
...mostly Christian Armenia, nationalists are also gaining new prominence. Communist Party leader Suren Arutunyan, who jailed many extremists last December following demonstrations in the capital of Yerevan, has ordered most of them released. Says Khachik Stamboltsyan, a member of the Armenian supreme soviet who spent six months in confinement: "Relations are still tense between us, but we talk a lot." Expressions of hatred toward Azerbaijan are the rule. "They had an earthquake in Baku recently," recounts an Armenian girl. "Too bad it didn't hit 20 on the Richter scale and wipe them...