Word: pact
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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While President Nixon prepared for his swing through the capitals of Western Europe, Eastern Europe last week marked a melancholy milestone. Six months have passed since Warsaw Pact tanks rumbled into Czechoslovakia, but Communism's East Bloc still remains uneasy and uncertain...
...invasion, in fact, only widened the schisms in Eastern Europe. After an initial period of intimidated silence, the Rumanians, the only active Warsaw Pact members that did not participate in the invasion, have become more outspoken than ever against Russian domination in Eastern Europe. Displeased, the Soviets in turn are pressing to hold Warsaw Pact maneuvers in Rumania this spring. Last week Soviet Marshal Ivan Yakubovsky, the Warsaw Pact commander, and Soviet First Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily Kuznetsov, until recently the Russian viceroy in Prague, visited Bucharest for a chat with Rumanian leaders...
Meanwhile, the Communists have stepped up the war of nerves, peppering West Berliners with public warnings of harsher measures to come and delivering chilling private threats to political leaders in West Berlin. Against that backdrop of anxiety, Soviet Marshal Ivan Yakubovsky, the commander of the Warsaw Pact, arrived in East Berlin for a conference-held, according to the East German news agency, in a "brotherly fighting spirit"-with military leaders from the other six Warsaw Pact countries. Yakubovsky has a Btfsplkian habit of turning up just before something big happens; he visited Berlin shortly before the Wall went...
West Berliners feared that his presence this time might foreshadow Warsaw Pact maneuvers in East Germany that could be used as a pretext for closing all ground routes to the city-and perhaps even for sending MIGs to buzz civilian airliners in the air corridors, as the Soviets did in 1965. Those fears were reinforced by Allied intelligence reports that the Soviets and East Germans had begun to move troops into the vicinity of West Berlin's land access routes...
Palach reportedly made a deathbed plea to "let no one else do it." His companions in the protest death pact apparently thought better of their vow-or at least about the method. In Prague, a pretty 18-year-old coed named Blanka Nachazelova died with her head in a gas oven. She left behind a note saying that she should have been Torch No. 2 but had chosen to use gas out of fear of the pain. The Czechoslovak Interior Ministry insisted that she had been forced to kill herself by unspecified other parties...