Word: czechoslovakias
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Following the collapse of the Russian Empire and the ensuing Bolshevik revolution, Ukraine was carved up among the Soviet Union. Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia. While the Poles and Romanians repressed their Ukrainian populations, persecution was even worse in the Soviet-controlled eastern portion...
...population numbers approximately 50 million people, of which 2.3 million live in the capital, Kiev. Ukraine is bordered on the south by the Black Sea; on the west and southwest by Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania; and on the north and northeast by Byelorussia and Russia. It covers more than 230,000 square miles...
Ukrainians are renowned for being fiercely nationalistic. During the past three centuries, the Russian empire, Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia have ruled all or part of Ukraine with an iron fist. In 1933, a famine, killing an estimated seven million Ukrainian villagers, took place under Stalin's control...
Since the Soviet party congress in February, three East European countries have had their own meetings. At the first congress in Czechoslovakia last month, Gustav Husak, 73, signaled that no winds of change would be blowing through his regime anytime soon. Echoing Gorbachev, Husak inveighed against mismanagement, but his dominant theme was self-congratulation. Husak has maintained absolute control by offering a Communist version of a consumer society while stifling opposition with one of the most efficient police states in the Soviet bloc. Czechoslovakia's relative prosperity, however, has been bought at a punishing price: by starving industry of needed...
...future leaders. Most of the aging party chiefs will almost certainly be replaced by technocrats in the Gorbachev mold. In Bulgaria, for example, Mining Engineer Chudomir Alexandrov, 49, has just been promoted to the powerful post of central committee secretary, and looms as a potential successor to Zhivkov. In Czechoslovakia a quiet changing of the guard is under way. Says a highly placed official in his 40s: "The older ones are going, and we're taking over." In Hungary the fading power and health of Janos Kadar, 73, are sparking a succession debate at the top level of leadership. Some...