I. Discontent: a Conflagration Sweeping the Soviet World

The reforms of perestroika in the Soviet Union and the centrifugal political movements which recently almost plunged Azerbaijan and Armenia into civil war, also agitate Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia on the Baltic, as well as (further south) Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. Heightened by the spectacular dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, these upheavals, as a whole, constitute a colossal movement of a magnitude unheard of since the two world wars or perhaps since the Napoleonic wars.

All of this activity within the European scene reflects varied circumstances and has different meanings, depending upon the place. Nevertheless, hovering above is a common meaning, encompassing and permeating the other meanings with a single impulse: Discontent.