Word: mikhail
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...When Mikhail Gorbachev instituted his policy of glasnost in the late 1980s, the Communist Party tried to practice a policy of regulated criticism. The goal was to "de-Stalinize" the Soviet Union, to resume Khrushchev's liberalization in the late 1950s. But eventually, glasnost led to the image of Lenin, not least with the publication of Vassily Grossman's Forever Flowing, a novel that dared compare Lenin's cruelty to Hitler's. While he was in office, Gorbachev always called himself a "confirmed Leninist"; it was only years later when he too--the last General Secretary of the Communist Party...
...reform or abolish itself, or to implode, became an admissible policy. Thatcher warmly encouraged Reagan to rearm and thereby bring Russia to the negotiating table. She shared his view that Moscow ruled an "evil empire," and the sooner it was dismantled the better. Together with Reagan she pushed Mikhail Gorbachev to pursue his perestroika policy to its limits and so fatally to undermine the self-confidence of the Soviet elite...
...Kentucky Fried Chicken parlor on the southwest corner of the square, and their spokesmen were 3,000 hunger strikers who spilled all over the central Monument to the People's Heroes. The unofficials even took over, and reversed, the formal symbolism of the government's ritual pageantry: when Mikhail Gorbachev came to the Great Hall of the People for a grand state banquet during the demonstrations--the first visit by a Soviet leader in 30 years--he had to steal in by the back door...
...again the icebreaker for the rest of Central Europe in the "velvet revolutions" of 1989. Walesa's contribution to the end of communism in Europe, and hence the end of the cold war, stands beside those of his fellow Pole, Pope John Paul II, and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...
...Solidarity would not die, and Walesa remained its symbol. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. With support from the Pope and the U.S., he and his colleagues in the underground leadership of Solidarity kept the flame alight, until the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin brought new hope. In 1988 there was another occupation strike in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, which Walesa again joined--though this time as the grand old man among younger workers. A few months later, the Polish communists entered into negotiations with Solidarity, at the first Round Table of 1989. Walesa...