Word: perestroika
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...that hardly mattered in the cold calculation of national interests that dominated four days of careful, even curt talks between Europe's two pre-eminent powers. Gorbachev's impoverished military superpower is keen to profit from Western investment and trade. And West Germany has joined the stampede to turn perestroika to its own economic and political advantage. By the time Kohl departed, both leaders hoped they had laid the basis for a new model of relations between Western Europe and the Soviet Union...
...Tallinn this summer, a call went out for community help. Working mostly with shovels, some 5,000 volunteers dug a trench more than a mile long in one night. A Soviet television reporter asked a ruddy-faced young Estonian why he had come. "I want to help so that perestroika doesn't begin just up there," the volunteer explained with a wave of the arm, "but with me here, with this shovel...
Those must have been gratifying words for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who has repeatedly pushed for less talk and more work. But they were double- edged. The shovel brigade was not organized by the Communist Party but by a new, pro-perestroika grass-roots movement called the Estonian Popular Front. Since the group first emerged last April in the most northerly of the Soviet Union's three Baltic republics, similar movements have taken root and flourished in neighboring Latvia and Lithuania, attracting hundreds of thousands of followers. What unites them is the common goal of promoting greater regional autonomy...
Under Gorbachev, the Kremlin has displayed a willingness to devolve more responsibility to local authorities. Visiting the region in August, Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev declared that "the national factor should become one more motive force of perestroika." Nowhere has Moscow's apparent about- face in the Baltics been more evident than in the guardedly favorable recognition given the popular fronts. When the Estonians held an organizational congress in Tallinn two weeks ago, Communist Party First Secretary Vaino Valjas brought greetings from Gorbachev. At the end of a similar conference in Riga last week, Latvian party leader Janis Vagris stressed that...
...viability of the regimes themselves. But the winds of the Gorbachev revolution have shaken Czechoslovakia and Poland. In Prague last week, Communist Party Leader Milos Jakes fired Lubomir Strougal, the country's Prime Minister for 18 years, and his entire 22-member Cabinet. Strougal's problem: sympathy for perestroika...