Word: unionizers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Whether the men in power were resisting the forces of democracy in China or trying to harness those forces in the Soviet Union and Poland, they could not escape potent reminders of the most ominous and fundamental of all of Marxism's contradictions: the one between people power and the power that Mao Zedong said comes from the barrel...
Still, history seemed to be deviating from its script. The trade union founded by a spunky electrician won the election in Poland, but the military seemed to stay in the barracks. The Soviet press blazoned news of violent ethnic unrest in Uzbekistan to a public it formerly kept in the dark about domestic strife. And even in China, where old men reverted to the only kind of power they knew, there was at least the phantom suggestion of tanks against tanks. But in the end, the name of the People's Liberation Army still turned out to be a cruel...
...Soviet Union, the latest outbreak of ethnic unrest in Uzbekistan was a reminder of what may be the operative difference between Deng Xiaoping's realm and Mikhail Gorbachev's: in the Middle Kingdom, things fall apart from the center outward, while in the U.S.S.R. it is the other way around. Both face a common challenge in devising ways to meet the demands of their citizens...
George Bush seems to see the problem clearly. He has said that the industrialized democracies, led by the U.S., should move "beyond containment" and "integrate the Soviet Union into the world order." But he has spoken of that opportunity -- which is really an obligation -- in the future tense, as something we should think about now but do something about later, if current trends continue...
...Communism belongs to a new generation of party leaders who must first grasp what much of the world already knows: that economic reform and political reform are impossible without each other. That generation, personified and led by Gorbachev, may have arrived at the pinnacle of power in the Soviet Union. In China it is still waiting for Deng Xiaoping and his fellow aged revolutionaries to accept the judgment of that lone, anonymous man in front of the tanks...