Word: archipelago
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Magadan. It is a name that turns Soviet hearts to ice and evokes memories of the long ago midnight knock on the door. The port of entry to the most deadly archipelago of the Gulag system, it became a synonym for the terror Joseph Stalin visited upon the land. At least 2 million prisoners were worked to death in its gold mines and timber forests and on its road projects. Since then, with few exceptions, the city of Magadan and the vast region around it have been closed to foreigners. When the Soviets permitted a small group to visit Magadan...
During the 1930s the only way to reach Magadan was by ship from Khabarovsk, which created an island psychology and the term Gulag archipelago. The prison ships were crowded hellholes in which thousands died. One survivor's memoir recounts that the prison ship Dzhurma was caught in the autumn ice in 1933 while trying to get to the mouth of the Kolyma River. When it reached port the following spring, it carried only crew and guards. All 12,000 prisoners were missing, left dead...
...however, as all the global village looked on, history turned into a clash of symbols in the Republic of the Philippines, a nation long relegated to its dustier corridors. There in the Southeast Asian archipelago of 56 million people and more than 7,000 islands, life not only imitated art but improved upon it. In a made-for-television drama watched by millions, two veteran rulers, President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda, stumbled and fell in their ruthless campaign to extend, with an immodesty broader than a scriptwriter's fancy, their stolen empire...
...L.D.P. candidates then hit the campaign trail with a vengeance. Like other Liberal Democratic leaders, the 68-year-old Prime Minister vigorously sought out Japanese voters from the northernmost island of Hokkaido to the southernmost archipelago of Okinawa. Outflanked and unprepared for the L.D.P. onslaught, the opposition got off to a slow start and never recovered. The Socialists, long the ruling party's most serious adversary, lost 25 seats in the lower house, bringing their total down to 86. The moderate Democratic Socialists did not fare much better, dropping sharply, from 37 seats to 26. The centrist, Buddhist-oriented Clean...
...expulsions illustrated, there is a delicate balance between freedom and authoritarianism in Indonesia. For two decades President Suharto, 64, has struggled to maintain stability in his strategically located republic. The archipelago's 13,677 islands sprawl 3,200 miles across some of the world's busiest East-West sea-lanes. With 173 million citizens, 87% of them Muslims, Indonesia is the world's fifth most populous nation. Though nonaligned, it has been friendly toward the U.S., and vice versa...