Word: stasis
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...further rocked last week by the old apparat. Three days after the election, CDU leader Lothar de Maiziere was accused of cooperating with the Stasi, the despised state security police under the old regime. The information came from the same sources who had supplied the documents that destroyed the brief political career of Wolfgang Schnur, leader of the small Democratic Awakening, a partner in the CDU alliance. Schnur resigned when the reports charging that he had provided information to the Stasi about his dissident clients proved true...
Under the old East German regime, no institution was more loathed than the Stasi -- the nickname for the Staatsicherheitdienst, or state security police. So it was hardly a surprise that the angriest protests since the November revolution were ignited last week when the government of Communist reformer Hans Modrow proposed that the Stasi, declared defunct on Dec. 17, be revived in a revamped form. It was also revealed that the ministry, which had 85,000 employees when it was officially disbanded, still has some 50,000 agents...
What did seem shocking was the violence of the protest. While an East Berlin crowd of more than 100,000 cheered from outside, several thousand demonstrators tore through part of the huge, 3,000-room building complex on Normanenstrasse. In November protesters entered Stasi offices, but only when accompanied by ordinary police and as part of an effort to ensure that records were not destroyed or spirited away. This time there was no such decorum. The invaders ripped through desks and files, shattered windows and upended furniture...
...standards of most young revolutions prior to the annus mirabilis of 1989, the event was rather tame. There was even some speculation that the Communist government had fomented the trouble to spread fear of disorder. Nonetheless, the sacking of Stasi headquarters epitomized a rising impatience with the pace of change in several East European countries. Increasingly aware of the strength they can wield in open demonstrations, many East Germans, Rumanians and Bulgarians seem to be growing more restive, more insistent in their demands. Their sights are often set, as they were in East Berlin, on the efforts of Communist officeholders...