Word: stasis
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...TEAM HIT German police, acting on information from files of the old East German secret service, the Stasi, arrested 11 suspected operators in a network that committed as many as 500 crimes, including murder and burglary. Two of those in custody are former Stasi generals based in Berlin. Police say the Stasi recruited the ring of criminals during the 1970s to kill those it considered enemies of the East German state and to perform other missions. The Stasi paid at least 21 Westerners about $1.25 million to commit the crimes...
...STASI is gone. The KGB has closed its doors. Most of the autocrats of Eastern Europe are dead. Democracy has swept the world...
...huge as it was, the surveillance operation was a failure in the end. It never fully gauged the true depth of disaffection for the regime or predicted its collapse. By trying to know everything, the Stasi apparatus knew nothing. Barbel Bohley, an artist and organizer of the New Forum movement that led the popular rebellion against the communist regime in 1989, found the information in her dossier ludicrous. "I have never read so much boring nonsense," she said after viewing 25 folders, less than half her file. "If that was my life, then for heaven's sake what did they...
Even Manfred Stolpe, the premier of Brandenburg and the east's most respected political figure, has been accused of having Stasi contacts when he worked as a church leader and civil rights advocate before the Wall fell. Stolpe readily concedes that he met with secret police officers. But, he says, the ministry was ubiquitous, and any attempt to reform the system or protect its victims involved negotiations with it. "I tried to use the opportunities I had to win more freedom at a time when I could not know that the Soviet empire would set us free," he said...
...Stasi files reveal treachery by parents, children, siblings, even spouses...