Word: communist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...East Germany it remained uncertain whether the Communist Party's last- ditch effort to fashion a new identity could save it from extinction. With the party's upper echelon disgraced, the taut discipline snapped down below. A half million of the 2.3 million cardholders have deserted the party in recent weeks, and last week middle-ranking members joined the opposition groups in crying for the departure of the power brokers who for 41 years imposed their rule. Citizens worked with the regular People's Police to prevent the shredding and theft of incriminating documents. Airline flights to Rumania were suspended...
...official monopoly of power of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, proud inheritor of Lenin's mantle, vanguard of world revolution...
...ideas floated in perestroika's wake, this reform ranked among the most wildly farfetched. But last week the prospect of abolishing the party's "leading role" in the U.S.S.R. gained momentum when the Lithuanian legislature voted 243 to 1 in favor of a constitutional amendment legalizing rivals to the Communist Party. While Lithuania thus became the first Soviet republic to do so, in neighboring Estonia the Communist Party Central Committee approved a similar proposal that should easily pass the legislature next month. In Armenia angry crowds surrounded parliament after legislators rejected a multiparty system. This week Andrei Sakharov and other...
These developments -- and the gleeful speed with which Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia have guillotined the Communist monopoly -- must make Mikhail Gorbachev feel like the sorcerer's apprentice. Unable to control the rising flood of reforms he has conjured up, he is finding it harder to keep afloat...
Meanwhile, the national Communist Party is under attack from within. Last month the leaders of Leningrad's Communist Party arranged an unprecedented demonstration to criticize Moscow for not defending the party against glasnost-inspired attacks. If this outburst reflects apparatchik sentiment, legalizing competitive groups would arouse not only outrage but perhaps a concerted effort to oust Gorbachev. The Leningrad protest provoked a countermarch by some 40,000 incensed citizens who proclaimed their support for Gorbachev's efforts to rejuvenate the party through open criticism...