Word: westernness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...villages painted sky blue and sienna, past gargantuan collective farms and gleaming new factories. Geese hissed, dogs barked, and Ceausescu listened to gripes. Sometimes speaking from a stack of concrete blocks, sometimes from the back of a wagon, he pressed home again and again a message more familiar to Western audiences than to Communists: "We are moving now; we want your help in building a better Rumania...
...after the U.S., Western Europe and Russia). That grip, so rigidly imposed during Stalin's lifetime, has loosened steadily over the past decade as the Communist regimes from the Baltic to the Black Sea have slowly found maneuvering room. Writes Rumanologist George Gross in the current issue of Problems of Communism: "A future Toynbee, looking at the 1960s, may well conclude that the central event of the current decade was the disintegration of the Soviet empire. Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe is fragmenting, and this process is bound to continue...
...Rusting Curtain. The fragments of Russia's dissolving European empire present a rough-edged mosaic to Western eyes, its pieces often inconsistent with one another, all parts undeniably Communist but just as emphatically nationalistic. The 2,000,000 Westerners-tourists and businessmen-who passed through the rusting Iron Curtain last year (a 15% increase over 1964) found themselves transported, as if by time machine, into a Europe that in appearance and manner is almost prewar. Men stalk the narrow, cobbled lanes of Warsaw's "Old Town" clad in ankle-length leather overcoats. The taxi fleet of Budapest...
...warm counterpoint-from the white sand beaches of Mamaia on the Black Sea, where 30 well-appointed new tourist hotels stand, to the clean, well-lighted cafés of Bucharest's Boulevard Magheru, where one can sip sweet Pinot Noir or bitter Turkish coffee. Fully 200,000 Western tourists visited Rumania last year, and a quarter as many again will go there...
...steam-wreathed polyethylene plant at Rumanian Ploesti; the scorching debate over Camus at Budapest's Hungaria Restaurant; the clanking Skoda automobile factory outside Prague; the student jazz joint in Warsaw where frugging and free verse give the lie to socialist realism. This is also the domain of the Western businessman, of the 500 Western firms which are engaged in cooperative ventures worth $800 million in Eastern Europe, and which will do many times that amount of business in the years ahead...