Word: sovietism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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PROFESSORS of Soviet and Eastern European Studies used to live the easy life. Day after day, they sat in their cushy university offices and waited for communist leaders to speak to the press...
...longer. Now, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev announces major policy initiatives to the press on a daily, rather than a quintannual, basis. Eastern European nations are stumbling over each other to declare their independence--witness the recent resignation of the entire East German Politburo. At this torrid pace, the Communist Bloc will soon generate more headlines than the Jane Pauley-Today Show feud...
...Prime Minister Mazowiecki has no plans to withdraw Poland from the Warsaw Pact, and an alliance declaration in July forbade the use of pact troops in the affairs of member nations. Still, Poland plans to push for further bilateral assurances. The Soviets are pressing NATO for a mutual phasing out of the Eastern and Western military alliances, but Moscow is certain to reject individual initiatives by pact members. As Soviet spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov said last week, "We may witness a change of government in Warsaw or Budapest, but international obligations do not necessarily go away with a change of government...
Though the U.S. and the Soviet Union might prefer to ignore the issue, Europeans are more visibly concerned. "The whole question," warns Bromke, "could conceivably slip out of everyone's hands but the Germans'." Czechoslovakia's Doudera puts the problem in even starker terms. "All of Germany's neighbors have got to be against reunification," he says. "Once East and West Germany have been unified, what is to stop the Germans from wanting to get back all their old lands in the east, from Pomerania to Silesia and Sudetenland...
...means political obliteration. Only West Germans talk eagerly about the prospect of regaining through peace what they lost through war. For many of them, the question is no longer if reunification can happen; the question is how soon. The vision is for a new Europe that extends to the Soviet border and beyond -- with a united Germany in the middle of the emerging entity. Says Chancellor Helmut Kohl: "If the Germans say, 'We belong together,' then no matter how long it may take, in the end they will achieve the unity and freedom of Germany...