Word: warsaw
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...might have been delivered as fittingly in Warsaw, Budapest, East Berlin, Bucharest or Sofia. For while the changing of the calendar rarely signifies the change of much else, the advent of 1990 throughout Eastern Europe gave the sense that a corner had been turned, that the time for the celebration of a revolution was passing and the time for the painful work of political, economic and moral reconstruction had begun...
...Warsaw the new year brought the implementation of an unprecedented plan to transform the Polish economy into a capitalist one. The cold turkey blueprint is well drafted, but initially it is likely to accelerate the nation's hyperinflation and cause serious unemployment and widespread bankruptcies. In Sofia the communist government held its first set of talks with opposition leaders. But already the new government was faced with another challenge: a countrywide general strike and mass protests against the restoration of religious and cultural freedom to the country's minority Turks. Havel's government set out on a course of economic...
...peacefully the process of change was transforming the world. Except in China, where troops mowed down students demonstrating for democracy in Tiananmen Square last spring, nation after nation saw crowds peacefully marching in the streets, and governments peacefully, if grudgingly, giving way. We want freedom!, the crowds chanted in Warsaw, Budapest, East Berlin, Sofia, Prague. One by one, the rejected leaders of the former Soviet satellites, abandoned by Moscow, promised free elections -- and more or less faded into oblivion. The Berlin Wall came tumbling down; the cold war ended. And only last week history was further rewritten when Czechoslovakia...
...more permanent role in politics, a pursuit he seems to love -- at least for this heady period of symbolizing freedom and basking in praise, before the hard task of transition sets in. He acknowledges that he does not know much about the intricacies of international economics or the Warsaw Pact, and some skeptics see him as susceptible to manipulation by other leaders of the Civic Forum revolutionary movement. But in times of philosophical upheaval, Plato may have been right: the philosopher makes the best king. Havel has written acutely about the psychological and metaphysical impact of the communist years...
...keeps reverting to the elements that have established patterns in his life: psychoanalysis, art, children (he has specialized in treating autistic children at the University of Chicago) and the Holocaust. Several of those patterns combine in his moving account of Janusz Korczak, who headed the Jewish orphanage in Warsaw, where a children's court enforced the children's rules. Despite friends' efforts to rescue him, Korczak insisted on staying with his children even as he walked hand in hand with them onto the train to Treblinka...