Word: sovietizers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...determined challenge, delivered Friday by Ronald Reagan with his back to the Berlin Wall, across from the Brandenburg Gate in Communist East Germany. But the necessity the President felt to remind West Berliners, of all people, that the Soviet leader still commands a totalitarian society underscored a melancholy aspect of Reagan's nine-day journey through Western Europe. For all his eloquence, the aging President was repeatedly upstaged by the youthful and suavely dynamic image of the man who was not there: Mikhail Gorbachev...
...with the leaders of the non-Communist world's seven principal industrial powers last week in Venice, almost the entire opening dinner was taken up by an animated -- and inconclusive -- discussion of Gorbachev's arms-control maneuvers and campaign for glasnost (openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring) within the Soviet Union. At a press conference after the summit, a reporter reminded the President of polls showing that West Europeans put more faith in Gorbachev than in Reagan as a leader working for peace. Reagan replied, correctly, that the prospective agreement to rid Europe of intermediate-range nuclear missiles is based...
Even Reagan's presence in Berlin at the close of his trip was in part a response to Gorbachev. The Soviet leader visited the eastern half of the divided city three weeks ago. Some U.S. planners feared, wrongly, that Gorbachev would make a sensational proposal to reunify Germany. They thought the President would have to deliver a reply...
Reagan in effect invited Gorbachev to prove he means his protestations of peace. Said the President: "Now the Soviets themselves may in a limited way be coming to understand the importance of freedom. We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness . . . Are these the beginnings of profound change in the Soviet Union? Or are they token gestures, intended to raise false hopes in the West or to strengthen the Soviet Union without changing it?" At that point Reagan issued his challenge to Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall...
...strong performance but not quite enough to erase the impression that Reagan is losing the initiative to his Soviet rival. For months before the President's trip, West European polls have been telling a distressing story. Whether the surveys are taken in Britain, West Germany, France, Italy or various combinations of countries, they have yielded consistent results: more West Europeans are looking to Gorbachev than to Reagan for leadership toward disarmament. In a poll sponsored by the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter and published last week, residents of nine European nations were asked which superpower leader was working harder to stop...