Word: authoritarians
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...corruption over his inner circle and his bargain-basement sale of the Russian state's most lucrative economic assets to a cabal of oligarchs in exchange for their funding of his reelection in 1996. Indeed, it is in the context of the failings of the Yeltsin years that the authoritarian nationalist orientation of his successor, President Vladimir Putin, is best understood...
...Yeltsin had moments that made one believe Russia could shed its authoritarian impulses and emerge as something of a Western-style democracy. His finest hour, really his defining moment, was in August 1991. The leader of the country, Mikahil Gorbachev, was in the Crimea on summer vacation, and dark forces opposed to Gorby and his stop-start reforms tried to stage a coup...
...reverse the concessions Yeltsin had made to end the first one.) He passed quickly from the political scene into relative obscurity as Putin launched an aggressive nationalist drive to reverse Russia's decline by reemphasizing a central role for the state in economic affairs and establishing a harsh, authoritarian regime that brooked little opposition...
...governed by Peter the Great. And that imperial contraction was achieved largely without bloodshed. Yeltsin's era, then, marked the end of the Cold War and the very idea of Moscow as a strategic threat to the West. But the Russia he created proved vulnerable to a reversion to authoritarian nationalism and a cooler relationship with the West. In the end, Yeltsin will be better remembered for that dramatic moment when he jumped on the tank to stop others from taking power through a coup rather than for what he achieved once in power himself...
...Tunisia and Libya, meanwhile, authoritarian policing has kept extremist groups from taking root. But as the January firefight that left a dozen Tunisian radicals dead after they'd returned from Algeria attests, some degree of regional cooperation already exists for al-Qaeda to build upon. Underground groups in Algeria, Niger, Mali, and Mauritania have long trafficked materiel, weapons and personnel among themselves. A January 2005 attack on a military post in Mauritania by fighters of the Algerian GSPC prompted the U.S. and certain European states to begin funding the $100 million annual Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative, seeking to make...