Word: walls
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...itself. Joseph Brodsky, the great Russian poet of the late 20th century, began to hate Lenin at about the time he was in the first grade, "not so much because of his political philosophy or practice...but because of the omnipresent images which plagued almost every textbook, every class wall, postage stamps, money, and what not, depicting the man at various ages and stages of his life...This face in some ways haunts every Russian and suggests some sort of standard for human appearance because it is utterly lacking in character...coming to ignore those pictures was my first lesson...
Reagan's actions toward the Soviets were matched by his constant rhetorical pounding of communism. He kept it up, for eight years, from "the evil empire" to "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," a constant attempt to use words to educate and inspire...
...communist state was developing on the Baltic coast, as did so many other peasant sons. A devout Roman Catholic, he was shocked by the repression of workers' protests in the 1970s and made contact with small opposition groups. Sacked from his job, he nonetheless climbed over the perimeter wall of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk in August 1980, at age 37, to join the occupation strike. With his electrifying personality, quick wit and gift of the gab, he was soon leading it. He moved his fellow workers away from mere wage claims and toward a central, daringly political demand: free...
...among younger workers. A few months later, the Polish communists entered into negotiations with Solidarity, at the first Round Table of 1989. Walesa and his colleagues secured semifree elections in which Solidarity proceeded to triumph. In August, just nine years after he had climbed over the shipyard wall, Poland got its first non-communist Prime Minister in more than 40 years. Where Poland led, the rest of Central Europe soon followed--and the Soviet Union was not far behind...
...Berlin Wall had come down a few weeks before, and no one doubted any longer that the great Soviet enterprise was headed for collapse. But for a while, Secretary Gorbachev would be treated as you and I would be treated if we had disposed of 40,000 nuclear missiles. And anyway, Gorbachev was a polemical swinger right to the end. The ideological imagination was hardly dead. The following Sunday, no doubt expressing the new Soviet line, chief press spokesman for the Kremlin Gennadi Gerasimov appeared with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes. It's true, he said, that communism is evolving...