This article is very superficial, while fproviding no new information at
all. And I don't see why just because Schorr is against something
("communism"), we should automatically be in favor of it.
At 09:38 AM 10/13/00 -0400, you wrote:
>The Christian Science Monitor, October 13, 2000, Friday
>
>Europe's last Red tide recedes
>
>By Daniel Schorr
>
>I was born a year before the Russian Revolution, and I think we may be
>witnessing the last ebbing of the tide of Communist tyranny that swept over
>Eastern Europe.
>
>In 1948, Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia stood up to Stalin and refused to
>accept the status of obedient satellite. But Mr. Tito had his own brand of
>dictatorial rule.
>
>The rollback of communism could be said to have started in East Germany in
>1953, soon after Stalin's death, with demonstrations that were bloodily
>suppressed by the Soviet Army. Beaten down, the forces of freedom in the
>Soviet empire remained sullenly silent for a few years.
>
>Then came Poznan in 1956, where Polish workers demonstrated for "bread and
>freedom," and Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had been a prisoner of Stalin, became
>the party chief. In Warsaw during the "Polish October," as they called it,
>I could smell the breath of freedom. But Poland would remain under wavering
>Soviet control until 1980, when workers led by Lech Walesa completed the
>counterrevolution that Poznan had started.
>
>In 1956, Hungary took Poland's cue and rose up against its Communist
>rulers. I was in Moscow then, where Nikita Khrushchev and the hard-liners
>in his Politboro argued fiercely about whether to go along with changes in
>Hungary or send in the tanks. In the end, they sent in the tanks, and
>hundreds of Hungarians died waiting for Western help that never came.
>
>The same in Czechoslovakia in 1968, where reformers tried out a more
>moderate form of communism called "Socialism with a human face." And soon
>the Soviet tanks were there, and the Kremlin leader promulgated the
>"Brezhnev doctrine" that no country, once in the Soviet orbit, gets to leave.
>
>But in the 1980s, the Kremlin could no longer enforce its will. And when
>East Germany's Erich Honecker asked Soviet troops to support his rule,
>Mikhail Gorbachev told him his regime was on its own. And the Berlin Wall
>came crashing down.
>
>The Czechs took to the streets, and soon their country was free under
>Vaclav Havel.
>
>In Yugoslavia, where Tito had managed to hold disparate nationalities
>together, the federation split asunder. Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and
>Macedonia went off on their own. Then there was not much left but Serbia,
>the last holdout against a tide of history.
>
>What started with Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky in Petrograd in 1917 is
>coming to an end in Belgrade in 2000.
>
>[Daniel Schorr is a commentator with National Public Radio in the USA, a
>liberal "alternative" to commercial radio stations.]
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
