Word: sovietism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...imagine a Soviet intervention in East Germany, where the Soviets have a lot of troops on the ground and therefore on the spot. If the East German Communist regime were to collapse through violence and if the Soviets were to remain passive, then the whole thing would collapse, in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The Soviets know that if they let go of East Germany, Poland is lost...
...same time, I left the Soviet Union with a sense of deep foreboding. We're getting to a point where Gorbachev and his colleagues will have to make some fundamental choices, all of them very difficult and all of them pregnant with dangers. He will either have to accelerate perestroika, really pushing it forward in the direction of pluralism and the free market, or he will have to engage in severe repression of the non-Russians...
...There will have to be something very different. The pace of change, the scale of change, and the drama of the change are all such that we have to stop thinking in conventional terms. Perhaps there will be a Soviet confederation of some sort, much looser than what there is now, with some new form of associated statehood for the Baltic republics. Georgia and some of the other more nationally defined republics could enjoy a much more independent status within the Soviet confederation. If they don't have that, then they will have to have some form of Great Russian...
...Urals seemed so palpably within grasp. Thus 1989 is destined to join other dates in history -- 1918 and 1945 -- that schoolchildren are required to remember, another year when an era ended, in this case the 44-year postwar period, which is closing with the rapid unraveling of the Soviet empire...
Accordingly, TIME invited five experts on European political and economic affairs -- a Soviet, a Hungarian, a Frenchman, a West German and an American -- to try and give definition to what Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev calls "the common European house." During a six-hour meeting last week at an 18th century mansion in Brussels, the "capital" of the twelve-nation European Community, the group was asked to share insights on the future of Europe. The panel was not always in agreement but found consensus on some basic points...