Snipped from a post by Mike Meeropol: >President Gerald Ford said on national TV that there was no Soviet >domination of Eastern Europe. I heard the broadacast, and understood him to mean either that the USSR had no de jure rights in Eastern Europe, or perhaps that they hadn't been able to suppress the cultural sovereignty, so to speak, of those countries (a Czech was still a Czech, &c). Obviously he couldn't have meant that the USSR didn't have predominant political influence in the region, and this is not what I heard him say. Of course, everyone jumped on him for the comment but, in a sense, 1989 may have proved him to be more correct than he was ever given credit. C.N.Gomersall Luther College [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://econ-www.newcastle.edu.au/economics/nick/nick.html
