Word: factly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that the Soviets are doing it well but that they are doing it at all. "We so quickly and lightly overlook the remarkable existence of perestroika and focus on the obstacles," says Robert Legvold, director of Columbia University's Averell Harriman Institute, "that we underestimate the significance of the fact that it has begun at all." Whatever happens, and whatever course it finally takes, the Gorbachev revolution has already become one of the greatest dramas and most momentous events of the second half of the 20th century...
...Gorbachev told Henry Kissinger when he visited Moscow earlier this year, "At any rate, things will never be the same again in the Soviet Union." Notes Kissinger: "This would be a modest result for so Herculean a task." Yes, but once again the contradiction is also true: the fact that the Soviet Union has been so deeply altered that it will never again be exactly the same is of monumental historic significance...
...Across the nation, almost a third of the party's 129 regional leaders lost. Estonians even had the courage to vote down the republic's KGB chief. The city party leader in Leningrad, running against an unknown 28-year-old shipyard engineer, received only 15% of the vote. In fact, the five top Communists in the Leningrad power structure tumbled to defeat. Valeri Terekhov, a member of Leningrad's Democratic Union, an opposition group, noted, "Gorbachev opened a volcano, and I don't think he realized the lava was so deep...
When Mikhail Gorbachev first sowed the seeds of democracy, no one could have foreseen that they would mature so quickly into grass-roots revolutions like the Estonian Popular Front. There may be times, in fact, when the Soviet leader must wonder if he has planted a brier patch. The Estonian initiative has given rise to other popular fronts in the Baltic states, but its indirect impact has been far greater. It has become a model for an amorphous mass of unofficial political groupings and single-issue movements across the country, championing causes long ignored by the party and government bureaucracy...
...hear everything unobserved, I sat at the dinner table and listened to Razhev and Karpov. The exchanges about ecology and the financial obligations of local factories to the surrounding community crackled. But it was not the flow of argument that impressed me so much as the fact that an American was allowed to listen. Had Soviet officials always spoken so bluntly among themselves? Or was this a reflection of plyuralizm, a borrowed word slipping awkwardly off Russian tongues...