Word: crackdowns
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This week's mass resignation by East Germany's Politburo and Cabinet is just the latest instance of rapid change sweeping Eastern Europe, and it could lead to either a military crackdown or a fundamental reform of the relationship between Moscow and its Warsaw Pact allies, Harvard professors said yesterday...
...things begin to unravel too much [in East Germany], there will be a crackdown and government by decree and martial law," said Baird Professor of History Richard Pipes, a member of the National Security Council under former President Ronald W. Reagan...
...Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze marked the anniversary of the Hungarian uprising by telling Moscow's new parliament that the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan had "blatantly violated" the law. By doing so, he implied that events like the 1956 Hungarian crackdown and the 1968 Czechoslovakian invasion would not recur. In addition, with a candor rare even in the West, Shevardnadze said of the controversial Krasnoyarsk radar station in Siberia: "Let's admit that this monstrosity the size of the Egyptian pyramid has been sitting there in direct violation of the ABM treaty." (His fealty to the treaty was in part...
...members of Ecoglasnost were later released, but the crackdown was a crude warning to Bulgarian political activists to watch their step. It was one more indication of just how nervous Eastern Europe's remaining hard-line regimes have become as a result of the year's dramatic political changes elsewhere in the bloc. The obdurate rulers in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Rumania refuse to imitate their reformist neighbors but can't help looking anxiously over their shoulder. "They are all worried about the fallout from change elsewhere," said a Western diplomat in the region. A Bulgarian proverb captures the fears: "When...
...answer is that significant reform is in the interests of the Soviet Union. It frees Moscow from expensive policing operations and could head off, in Eastern Europe, the sort of protests that plague many of the Soviet republics. East Europeans are far less concerned about a Moscow-initiated crackdown than about a heavy-handed backlash from within the bloc. So is Mikhail Gorbachev. If Czechoslovakia were to launch an anti-opposition campaign, warns Bromke, "it would undermine Gorbachev's prestige at home and in the bloc and make it more difficult for him internationally...