Word: backwardness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...military machine may still look formidable from 22,000 miles up, the altitude from which American spy satellites snap pictures of armored columns on maneuver. But at ground level, the Soviet army looks more like a lot of bewildered 17-year-olds, many of them far from their backward, non- Russian homelands, bouncing around in the back of clunky trucks on potholed roads leading nowhere useful to their country's devastated economy. Yet they are counted under the ominous rubric of 4.25 million men under arms in the Warsaw Pact. So are over a million troops, most of them draftees...
...Gorbachev phenomenon is the result of Soviet pride and Soviet shame. For more than a generation, the citizens of the U.S.S.R. have lived with that contradiction. They have had the satisfaction of knowing their country was a superpower -- and the frustration of living in a backward economy. They made their homes in crowded, decrepit dwellings. Shopping for necessities was a daily despair. Citizenship itself was often an insult and sometimes an injury. Their government would not let them express their thoughts or travel abroad. For years they could explain it all away: the hardship was the aftermath of the Great...