Word: perestroikas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
After 15 years of authoritarian rule, Pinochet agrees to uphold results of a plebiscite. While the vote is a turning point, it will not transform the country overnight, and the future is far from certain. -- Perestroika brings intriguing changes to the KGB. -- Why South Africa is so eagerly courting its black neighbors. -- Foreign troops are leaving, but Angola still bleeds...
...Estonian capital of Tallinn last week, more than 3,000 ethnic activists tested the outer limits of Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost. A congress of the nationalist organization, Estonia's Popular Front in Support of Perestroika, called for more regional autonomy, political democratization, economic freedom, a new currency and adoption of Estonian as the sole national language. But in its push for political changes, the Front stopped short of demands for secession...