Word: five
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Fifteen TIME journalists met with five experts on European affairs in Brussels last week to discuss the changes sweeping across the East bloc. "The situation is so volatile that even journalists have trouble keeping up," says assistant managing editor Karsten Prager, who originally scheduled the one-day session for January but then decided that sooner would be better than later. "The conference helped establish some sense of where things might be heading...
...free society. But compared with what the Soviet people had before, the changes are breathtaking. His economic reforms, perestroika, have been an abject failure. For example, in the ten years of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms, the per capita income of the Chinese people has doubled. In the five years of Gorbachev's rule, the per capita income of the Russian people has gone down. But while Gorbachev has only marginally changed the Soviet Union, he has profoundly changed the world, simply by saying what many in the West want to hear after generations of Soviet intransigence...
...Opposition. The party and government acknowledged popular unrest by meeting with representatives of nine opposition groups and five non-Communist parties...
...most somber note at the session was struck in assessing the state of the Soviet Union. Soviet panelist Andranik Migranyan, senior research fellow at Moscow's Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System, warned that after five years of perestroika, "our economists say we have yet to hit the bottom. The people are acutely aware of the gap between words and deeds by the government. We feel we might be entering a period of chaos." Already, Migranyan warned, a loose coalition of forces -- disgruntled members of labor bureaucracies, ethnic Russian nationalists and members of the Communist elite, or nomenklatura...
Accordingly, TIME invited five experts on European political and economic affairs -- a Soviet, a Hungarian, a Frenchman, a West German and an American -- to try and give definition to what Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev calls "the common European house." During a six-hour meeting last week at an 18th century mansion in Brussels, the "capital" of the twelve-nation European Community, the group was asked to share insights on the future of Europe. The panel was not always in agreement but found consensus on some basic points...