Word: communisms
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...1960s. He served two terms as president but somehow managed to maintained a reputation as an affable, reluctant head of state. In the early days of his Presidency, he invited jugglers and street performers into the presidential residence for "a festival of democracy" to exorcize the demons of communism...
Robert Service is professor of Russian history at Oxford University, visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Comrades. Communism: A World History
Within months of the collapse of communism in 1989, hideous hybrid organizations including among their numbers newly unemployed secret policemen - together with the likes of Olympic wrestlers and weightlifters - seized effective control of former Warsaw Pact states like Bulgaria. What began as muscle-bound gangs, running the streets of Sofia and other cities, quickly graduated into networks that, for example, become the major importers of stolen cars from Western Europe...
...have had difficulty adjusting to this rapacious new model of international crime. Old patterns of family and clan ties have given way to networks whose obsessive focus is on making money - lots of it, as quickly as possible. The global integration of capital markets, coupled with the fall of communism, has triggered an enormous explosion of international financial flows, which has both facilitated criminal behavior, as trillions of dollars slosh around the world, and made it much more difficult to combat crime. Winer and his colleagues identified the development of a coherent global anti-money-laundering strategy...
...Magic Powder It is not only in the former Soviet Union and its satellites that the twin forces of globalization and communism's end have created criminal networks. In Africa, for example, proxy conflicts of the cold-war continent mutated into much more deadly struggles between criminally financed militias over minerals. Nowhere was this more clear than in the awful war in the Democratic Republic of Congo that broke out in 1998. In large measure, the war was driven by complex criminal conspiracies. A map of the main zones of conflict between the various armies and militias coincides with...