Word: ones
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...their shame. There was, therefore, a national murmur of interest in 1979, when the country got its first look at Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev at a televised awards ceremony. Not only did this new Central Committee Secretary, then 48, seem at ease among the ruling septuagenarians; he was the only one able to say thank you for his medal without reading from a 3-by-5 card...
...satellites, or captive nations of Eastern Europe, are defecting en masse to the West. They are doing so because Gorbachev is letting them. In the U.S.S.R. the old order is not just passing; it is already on what Leon Trotsky called the trash heap of history. No one, certainly including Gorbachev, knows what is coming next. But whatever it is, it will be something...
...sudden, the No. 1 man in the Kremlin was saying he would not back them up and that they had to find a way of making a genuine social compact with their own people, or fall. Hence the most amazing events of 1989 -- and of the decade: one after another, with breathtaking speed, the communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe came tumbling down...
...been held since World War II. Solidarity turned itself into a political party -- the first true opposition in the Soviet bloc -- so it could contest all 100 seats in the new Senate and 161 of the seats in the lower chamber, the Sejm. In June Solidarity won all but one of the contested seats. In August, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, editor of Solidarity's weekly newspaper, was sworn in as the first noncommunist Prime Minister in Eastern Europe since Stalin had imposed his system there 40 years ago. Society -- led, with appropriate irony, by the workers whom Marx and Engels...
Shibboleths in the West were evaporating almost as fast as regimes in the East. It had long been a tenet of conventional wisdom that Czechoslovakia, the homeland of the Good Soldier Schweik, would be one of the last nations to join the march of freedom. Maybe, just maybe there would be another Prague Spring in 1990. But the thaw came in the fall instead. Demonstrations began in mid- November. The first was a legal assembly of students sponsored by the communist-dominated Socialist Union of Youth. But that organization was seething with discontent, and 3,000 of the marchers moved...