Word: popularity
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...being a glasnost groundbreaker, but few who tuned in one Wednesday evening nearly a year ago were quite prepared for what happened. During a debate about making the political system more democratic, a novel notion came up. Why not unite people who support perestroika into something resembling the popular-front movements that lobbied for social reforms in Europe during the 1930s? For a moment, the question hung in the air. Nothing like it had ever been tried in the Soviet Union. Telephone lines soon jangled with enthusiastic offers of support. When the broadcast ended at midnight, excited participants remained...
...been the same since that night of April 13, 1988. Certainly, life changed dramatically for Marju Lauristin, 48, a journalism professor who had watched the show at home in the university city of Tartu. Inviting other activists to her apartment, she helped write the founding declaration of the Estonian Popular Front. Less than three weeks later, local party officials gave the group guarded approval to organize...
When Mikhail Gorbachev first sowed the seeds of democracy, no one could have foreseen that they would mature so quickly into grass-roots revolutions like the Estonian Popular Front. There may be times, in fact, when the Soviet leader must wonder if he has planted a brier patch. The Estonian initiative has given rise to other popular fronts in the Baltic states, but its indirect impact has been far greater. It has become a model for an amorphous mass of unofficial political groupings and single-issue movements across the country, championing causes long ignored by the party and government bureaucracy...
...petite woman with gray hair, Lauristin may seem an unlikely revolutionary, but she is as much a rebel in her own way as was her father Johannes, a prominent Estonian Bolshevik. Her Popular Front has taken the organizational model of the party and turned it upside down. The movement promotes no rigid political platform, except a general commitment to democracy and pluralism, and welcomes everyone into its ranks. Its central steering committee is an umbrella organization for dozens of local chapters that open their doors to any citizens' groups with a worthy cause. In Tartu the Popular Front joined with...
...eager to drop their traditional roles as perpetuators of useful historical myths and instead tell the painful truth. Gorbachev gave the signal in a February 1987 speech inviting them to fill in the "blank spots" in Soviet history, and writers have responded with everything from weighty historical tomes to popular entertainments...