Word: tides
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...flow of history, there is sometimes a tide that can sweep in the most profound changes. The people of Eastern Europe sense just such a tide washing over them now, a political swell that has already propelled Solidarity to power in Poland, transformed Communism to socialism in Hungary and punched through the Wall in Berlin. Last week the irresistible tide reached Bulgaria and even pounded at the entrenched Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Men and women across the full breadth of the East bloc were attempting to catch the wave, aware that it must be done before a historic opportunity...
...trying to cross at five border points were turned back, possibly to prevent any disruption of a party Congress this week. With the Soviet Union now encouraging the reforms that felled other hard-line rulers, the tyrannical Ceausescu last week turned to China for support in standing firm. The tide of reform is not likely to reach Bucharest so long as its despotic leader survives. Any Rumanian bold enough to speak out is beaten, harassed or imprisoned. Says Jane Ingham, a Rumanian specialist in England: "The regime is so oppressive that no opposition movement is able to exist...
...Even in Moscow, party leaders were struggling to come to terms with the revolution being wrought in Eastern Europe. Official papers were both elated by the changes and wary that the democratic tide might wash away the postwar boundaries of Europe. Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev observed that the renewal in Poland, Hungary and East Germany "poses a threat to none, except, maybe, those countries that have yet to go through the process of democratization." Moscow was preparing to ease rules for travel and gave no sign that the tidal wave in Eastern Europe has reached the limit of its tolerance...
Images of the violation recur. When Berliners in the Soviet-run sector woke on the morning of Aug. 13, 1961, to find families sundered and the city rived by barbed wire -- and soon concrete -- many frantically sought routes of escape. The Berlin Wall was meant to halt a tide of migrants to the West that had left East Germany short of workers and threatened the stability of the Communist regime: more than 2.7 million had departed since the founding of the German Democratic Republic in 1949, 30,000 in July 1961 alone...
...really change: many who fled last week said they had no faith Krenz would fulfill his pledges. But change -- radical change, unimaginable change -- is coming to East Germany one way or another, and some think it will not stop until it has redrawn the boundaries of the country. The tide of events is washing away leaders and eroding the ideology of a rigidly orthodox state. Swept away too are many of the old certainties that have given shape and substance to the division of Europe settled at Yalta. Among them is the central and long- standing assumption, in Moscow...