Word: states
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Forum brought up to 70,000 people into the streets last Monday, three party secretaries signed a declaration promoting a more open dialogue. In Dresden party functionaries met with 20 opposition representatives. Encouraging as these moves may be, there is always the possibility of a reversal. If the state decides to clamp down, it is hard to predict whether the opposition forces will turn out to be marathoners, like the Poles, or easily winded sprinters, like the Panamanians...
...three eyes," said the alien, a 9-ft.-tall assemblage of humps, arms and legs, outfitted in silver overalls and bronze boots. "This planet is so much like my own. When I landed in my pink space ball, the sunset lighted up tall nonnatural structures that resembled the state housing collectives back home. I've gone through your papers and read all about the two-headed Abominable Snowmen and the psychic cures for arthritis -- Oh, the secret balsam-water diet that lets you lose 40 lbs. in two days and prevents tooth decay? Leonid wants me to bring the details...
...many Soviets, however, the fascination with the magical and the extrasensory is a distasteful reminder of the final years of the Russian empire -- with its demagogic holy men and a royal family under the sway of Rasputin. "It's deplorable that the state-run media would contribute to this hysteria," said Dr. Yakov Rudakov, a leading psychotherapist with the Institute for Physical-Technical Problems. Even the obsession with UFOs may be a projection of Soviet anxieties, a pseudoscientific distraction from the increasing economic and political burdens of daily life. Enraged that TASS publishes such reports, one Muscovite said...
...disillusioned party member views state sponsorship of psychic and UFO studies as a new sort of official opiate. Says he: "They've been feeding us rubbish about the dream of Communism for years, and we now see they were lying. At least this gives us something new to dream about." So the next time aliens approach and ask for directions, point them toward Moscow. The Soviets need them more than ever...
...most complete undertaken by a Communist Party in Eastern Europe. Not even in Poland, where a Solidarity-led coalition has been governing for nearly two months, have Communists subjected themselves to so radical a purge of their political philosophy. In Hungary it marks the end of the party-state, the Marxist concept of a fused identity that still underpins governments in Beijing, Havana and Bucharest. The party will even examine ways of divesting itself of property acquired during the 40 years in which it and the state were virtually indistinguishable...