Word: blocs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Norodom Ranariddh agreed today to end his armed resistance to Hun Sen, the nation's new strongman who ousted Ranariddh in a bloody coup July 5. Under the deal, reached by members of Ranariddh's royalist party and foreign ministers representing the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, an economic bloc comprising several regional countries, military operations will cease and a caretaker government will be formed comprising the prince's party and Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party until elections next year. The deal also gives King Norodom Sihanouk, Ranariddh's father, authority over the armed forces and calls...
...keeping the peace for the past 48 years will open its doors to former adversaries. Some will be invited to join as full members soon; others will be encouraged to do so later; and representatives of all the emerging democracies in what used to make up the Soviet bloc will intensify their cooperation with NATO on a range of common concerns, from arms control to regional crisis management...
There's one simple explanation for the triumph of capitalism over Soviet communism: we had Astaire and Marilyn; all they had were boy-loves-tractor pictures. As the battle of the ideologies was fought on movie screens around the world, the edifying drabness of Soviet-bloc films couldn't compete with America's glamorous, sexy, lilting pop culture. As Dana Ranga, director of the terrific documentary East Side Story, puts it, "A specter was haunting communism: the specter of Hollywood...
...joke. Many Commusicals were censored for having a decadent Westernized tone. As an officious official bellows to a young dancer in Carnival Night (U.S.S.R., 1957), "We want to raise the consciousness of our workers. But what do you expect to raise with naked legs?" Only about 40 Soviet-bloc musicals were made in 40 years, from The Jolly Fellows to the glossy, ginchy No Cheating, Darling (G.D.R., 1973). Yet these films brought vigorous fun to an audience starved for it. Their makers deserved to be named Heroes of the Soviet People...
...Russian musical died with Stalin, but the '50s and '60s saw a little bloom in Soviet-bloc musicals that were much more in step with Hollywood films. In three 1965 movies you'll see a dapper gent figure-skating around a woman in her bedroom (the Czech-East German The Wayward Wife), a DayGlo-bright production number in a spa (Woman on the Rails, Czechoslovakia), a Bulgarian Connie Francis in full taunt (The Antique Coin). But the syncopated clock was ticking; Commusicals fizzled out, as Hollywood song shows did, in the early...