Word: powerful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...below" or a coup from the right. A hint of the first surfaced last summer, when half a million Soviet miners went on strike. The miners not only won all of their basic demands, but set up strike committees that became for a while the headquarters of local political power. Yeltsin himself has called those committees "the embryos of real people's power." If a new wave of strikes rolled across the Soviet Union, the nationwide momentum from below for political change might prove unstoppable...
Last week's narrow defeat of a Supreme Soviet motion to debate an end to one-party rule showed just how tenuous the authority of the Soviet Communist Party now is. Striking workers might bring about not only a collapse of power in Moscow but the snapping of links to the outlying republics. A wave of secessionism might then follow, with the probability of murderous ethnic strife in its wake...
...many Third World Communist insurgencies. The U.S. economy would benefit handsomely from vastly reduced defense expenditures. But the blessings of a Soviet collapse would certainly be mixed. Just as the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I led to Hitler's brutal exploitation of the resulting power vacuum, so the end of the Pax Sovietica in Eurasia might touch off an ethnic bloodbath among the squabbling successor regimes. For University of Alabama historian Hugh Ragsdale, a Soviet collapse would lead to a disastrous "Balkanization" of Eurasia and the emergence of "dozens of Khomeinis . . . skulking incognito among...
Chile's long democratic tradition was finally back on track last week after a 16-year hiatus. In the first presidential election since the bloody 1973 coup that ousted Marxist Salvador Allende Gossens and brought General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte to power, voters elected Patricio Aylwin, 71, a Christian Democrat. As soon as Aylwin's victory seemed assured, thousands of citizens poured into the streets in jubilant celebration. Said Aylwin: "Chile has again taken destiny into its own hands...
...former Senator who ran as head of a 17-party center-left coalition, Aylwin received 55.2% of the vote, easily defeating both a right-wing candidate backed by Pinochet and a populist businessman. Pinochet, whose attempt to retain power was rebuffed last year in a national plebiscite, is scheduled to step down March 11. But by staying on as Commander in Chief of the army for at least eight years, he will keep a hand on the reins...