Word: sovietism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...critical moment in the transformation of U.S.-Soviet relations came on Nov. 16, just over two weeks before the meeting in the Med. That was the day Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney announced that because the Warsaw Pact was becoming "a very different animal," the U.S. could reduce its defense spending. For the Kremlin, it was the best news out of Washington in years, and not just for the obvious reason that less is better where the other superpower's arsenal is concerned. As seen from Moscow, the eventual military consequences of the Pentagon cuts are less important than...
...this week, in what may be the most important speech ever delivered before the U. N. General Assembly, Gorbachev put on a bravura performance of what he calls new political thinking and set an agenda for a post-cold-war world order. He proclaimed a benevolent decimation of the Soviet armed forces, an effective 10% drawdown in manpower and hardware. He earned loud cheers and enthusiastic praise around the world, but not from the newly elected leader in Washington. George Bush was into his prudence thing, not his vision thing. As the Administration took shape, it radiated not just caution...
...pattern continued for months. Something extraordinary would happen in the East -- down would come the barbed wire along the old Iron Curtain, off would go the light in the red star over the parliament building, home would go trainloads of Soviet troops, in would come a non-Communist prime minister -- and the response from Washington was the sound of one hand clapping. There were schoolmarmish homilies about the need to "test" Gorbachev's slogan of new political thinking and complaints about what he had not done for the West lately...
...Milos Jakes, the beginning of the end came early last summer. In a series of private exchanges between the Czechoslovak Communist Party leader and Mikhail Gorbachev and his advisers, the Soviet President made clear that his own internal situation demanded a repudiation of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. If Jakes, 67, did not want to be undercut by the Soviet move, he would have to act -- and act soon. An agreement between Moscow and Prague was struck. Come October, Jakes would convene a Central Committee meeting and expel all Politburo members tainted by the 1968 invasion -- except himself. After appointing...
...came and went with nothing done. In mid-November, hard-line ideology chief Jan Fojtik traveled on short notice to Moscow, where he met with Georgi Smirnov, chief of the Moscow Institute of Marxism-Leninism. Smirnov said that a document condemning the 1968 invasion had been approved by the Soviet Politburo, and he warned that with the Malta summit approaching, the document would soon be published...