Word: reformist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Armenia. But after a dramatic all- night debate, legislators in the Supreme Soviet did what not so long ago was unthinkable. They rebuffed the strike proposal as "unconstitutional" and voted instead to put strict limits only on work stoppages that affect critical industries. Said Leningrad Deputy Anatoli Sobchak, a reformist: "We just spent a couple days in the school of democracy. And all the talk led somewhere...
...recent months Prime Minister Hun Sen has been winning favorable reviews. Once regarded as a mere puppet of the authorities in Hanoi, Hun Sen, 38, has emerged as a leader with a mind of his own. Whether by conviction or out of cynical self-interest, he has pursued reformist policies designed to repair his country's shattered economy as well as to endear him to skeptical citizens: the institution of land-tenure rights for farmers, the beginnings of a free-market economy and recognition of Buddhism as the state religion. While Hun Sen's cloudy history as a former member...
Fukuyama, like too many others in the Bush Administration, seems convinced that the reformist, liberalizing trends sweeping the Communist world are essentially irreversible, requiring little more than the applause of the West. Even if updated to take account of the massacre in Tiananmen Square and the Politburo warnings of a crackdown in the Baltics, Fukuyama's thesis will probably not persuade Lech Walesa that history has yet reached a happy ending in Poland...
Andranik Migranyan, a Soviet intellectual, last week explicitly condemned the Brezhnev Doctrine in the reformist weekly Moscow News. Migranyan noted, however, that "the ((democratic)) processes going on in ((Poland)) may be properly understood by the Soviet Union only when Soviet foreign policy interests are not challenged." No one knows how Moscow's military hard-liners would have reacted had Walesa refused to leave the Defense and Interior ministries in Communist Party hands...
Ironically, Poland's resounding display of democracy seemed likely to make other Soviet-bloc regimes -- already bedeviled by reformist rumblings -- rethink the wisdom of opening up the electoral process. Said a senior Western diplomat in Warsaw: "It may have been the worst possible result for glasnost in Eastern Europe. Every Communist Party in the region must now be aware that democratization is the beginning...