Word: afghanistan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...after Sakharov repeatedly denounced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he was placed under house arrest. He and his wife Elena Bonner were held in confinement by KGB guards 24 hours a day in a small apartment in Gorky, 261 miles east of Moscow. There both became increasingly incapacitated by heart disease. Word reached Moscow's dissident community that Bonner's lips and fingernails had turned blue and that Sakharov could hardly take a few steps without being winded. When the Soviets denied Bonner permission to go abroad for an open-heart operation, her husband went on a hunger strike...
...Sakharov found numerous causes to pursue. Encouraged by bilateral cuts in Soviet and U.S. arsenals, he pressed for conventional-arms reductions and a demilitarized "corridor" in Europe to lessen the possibility of a surprise attack from either side. He was hardly placated when Moscow admitted that the invasion of Afghanistan had been a mistake; he criticized the government for a colonialist attitude toward Armenia and the Baltic states. Though a supporter of Gorbachev's basic reforms, he used the Congress of People's Deputies as a tribune to attack him for accumulating too much personal power. "There are no guarantees...
...total collapse of the Soviet Union might create almost as many global problems as it solved. Regional despotisms like Fidel Castro's Cuba or Najibullah's Afghanistan would probably wither quickly, as might many Third World Communist insurgencies. The U.S. economy would benefit handsomely from vastly reduced defense expenditures. But the blessings of a Soviet collapse would certainly be mixed. Just as the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I led to Hitler's brutal exploitation of the resulting power vacuum, so the end of the Pax Sovietica in Eurasia might touch off an ethnic bloodbath among...
Rather than just applauding what he has done, let us examine why. When Gorbachev came to power he found he was presiding over a military superpower and a Third World economic power. His clients in Cuba, Viet Nam, Ethiopia, Angola and Nicaragua required huge subsidies. Afghanistan was costing lives as well as money. In Eastern Europe the explosive forces of dissent were building dangerously. The stagnant Soviet economy was falling further and further behind the West. Gorbachev's only option was to reform at home and retrench abroad...
...reforms do go far enough to work, it is still not in our interest to help Gorbachev unless his foreign policy becomes less aggressive. Even as he issues calls for "new thinking," Soviet power is being applied against American interests in Afghanistan and El Salvador and for propping up anti- American regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea and Libya. When Gorbachev asks the U.S. to help pay for perestroika, we should insist he pay for it himself by cutting his budgets for defense and foreign adventures...