Nation Topics - World | The Nation

When Achille Occhetto, the new General Secretary, closed the debate at the Eighteenth Congress of the Italian Communist Party (P.C.I.) in Rome on March 21, the delegates gave him a ten-minute sta

With Boris Yeltsin triumphantly defying the establishment in Moscow, Lech Walesa guiding the Polish opposition into Parliament and Imre Pozsgay, a member of the Hungarian Politburo, arguing in B

There was no miracle at the polls for the regime of Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski.

The rulers of the capitalist world who came to Paris
for the bicentennial celebrations last month were
in a smug mood.

Dual power, Lenin wrote, cannot last long. But just how long?

For the next weeks and months the eyes of the world
will be focused on Poland, where events are now unfolding at an unexpectedly dramatic pace.

Slogans sometimes succeed in conveying the mood of a period.

History knows no neat radical breaks.

"The Party always arrives five minutes after the hour," one critical East Berlin Communist complained bitterly, just as events there were gathering momentum.

"Havel to the castle": In the doubly festive mood just before Christmas the heart of Prague was full of posters bearing that slogan and a picture of Vaclav Havel, the
famous playwright, his shi