Word: polished
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Jaruzelski had destroyed his bridges to the Polish nation. The attempt to find quislings in the Solidarity leadership had apparently failed. So had overtures to the intellectuals. Nor has the church been an ally. The general seemed condemned, at least for the present, to rule by force alone. It was an ironic mission for a self-pro claimed patriot who had once vowed never to use armed might against his own people...
Genuine fear pervades the city. People are asking their foreign friends not to drop by any more. The 4 a.m. knock on the door by the secret police is back in practice, although sometimes with the usual Polish twist. In at least two cases, people who were given the option of signing a loyalty oath prepared by the government or going to a detention center managed to persuade the agents who came for them to accept a more innocuously worded statement...
...Soviet Union's extension of a new $3.8 billion trade credit to Poland last week illustrated a truth that is centuries old: empires, ultimately, are expensive. Since mid-1980, when Polish workers staged the strikes that led to the creation of Solidarity, the Kremlin has pumped $4 billion into its neighbor, some of it in rubles that can be used only to settle bills within the Soviet-bloc Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), some of it in hard currencies that can buy goods or pay debts in the West. But the Soviet Union also supplies its allies with...
...first two decades after World War II, it was Moscow that exploited the economies of its satellites. East German factories were dismantled and moved to the Soviet Union. Czech uranium and Polish coal were shipped east and used in Soviet plants. But the relationship changed in the early 1970s, when the world price of oil and other raw materials rose dramatically and the Soviets decided to protect their Eastern European clients from the full brunt of the increases...
Because of the Polish crisis, the Soviet Union's cash balance in Western banks dropped at least $5 billion last year, to a level of $3.6 billion. The Soviets were forced to sell an estimated 200 metric tons of gold, more than twice the 90 tons sold in 1980, to raise an estimated $2.6 billion in Western currencies. The sale of ingots is one of the main reasons that the price of gold, which reached a record $850 an ounce in January 1980, is now around...