Word: sovietize
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Their legitimacy derives from their role as custodians of the Communist faith. One important measure of their stewardship is the maintenance of Moscow's primacy as the leader of world Communism. The Soviet leaders need a successful conference to prove to their own people that they are indeed the legitimate heirs of Lenin. "To justify one-party rule," says Kremlinologist Victor Zorza, "you must have an international sanction." The Soviet leaders also need the international endorsement to reassert their primacy within Eastern Europe. For all these reasons, Leo Labedz, editor of Survey, a London quarterly on Communist affairs, calls...
...Soviets made careful housekeeping preparations for the conference. In the Kremlin gardens, the beds of long-stemmed tulips and multicolored pansies were especially neatly tended, and squads of plainclothes security agents checked passes and guided the delegates to the huge hall. For several days, Brezhnev, Kosygin and other ranking officials shuttled to Moscow's four airports welcoming arriving delegations. For trusted comrades like East Germany's Walter Ulbricht and Mongolia's Yumzhagin Tsedenbal, there were Slavic smacks on the cheek. There were no kisses for the arriving Rumanians. Brezhnev proffered a perfunctory hand to Rumania's independent-minded President...
...initial preparatory meeting, held in Budapest in February 1968, ended on an ominous note as the Rumanians, on orders from Ceausescu, walked out because they were criticized for not following the Soviet line of condemning Israel. An infinitely greater disruption came a few months later, when the forces of five Warsaw Pact nations, led by the Soviet Union, crashed into Czechoslovakia. Russia only outraged the majority of foreign Communists by stamping out a liberal experiment with which they sympathized and one that could have helped them win votes in the free world. At the same time, Russia once again ground...
Foreign Communist reaction was an indication of both the Soviet Union's waning authority and the villainy of the deed. Twelve years earlier, in the much bloodier suppression of the Hungarian uprising, nearly every Communist Party in the world had supported the Soviet action. This time every major foreign party expressed disapproval, ranging from violent protest (Italy, Sweden, Yugoslavia) to distaste tempered by expediency (France and Cuba). Even Ru mania, a member of the Warsaw Pact, though it did not take part in the invasion, censured the action. Only in significant parties that depend on the Soviet dole (such...
...Soviet instigation, a joint draft was drawn up by a committee of eight parties and submitted to a preparatory session attended by 65 parties in Budapest last February. Other parties offered some 300 amendments, at least 100 of which were incorporated in the text. In order to hold a conference at all, the Soviets had to scratch out the old claim, reaffirmed by the 1960 world conference, that they were the leaders of the world Communist movement. Further, they had to delete any critical reference to China or any wording that could be construed as approval of the invasion...