Word: gorbachev
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...attempt to create a Star Wars antimissile defense, were putting heavy pressure on the Soviet Union to keep up. Moscow was vulnerable because the Soviet economy was decaying badly, and its leadership was nearly paralyzed. Only in 1985, after three Kremlin funerals in three years, did a leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, emerge who was realistic and vigorous enough to attempt drastic reforms...
...series of summits, Gorbachev and Reagan brought about a de-escalation of the arms race, which the Soviet leader realized was swallowing more resources than he could afford. The European satellites were too, so Gorbachev told their chiefs that Soviet tanks would no longer keep them in power. That started a chain reaction that left both sides dumbfounded. By the end of 1989, the Soviet bloc had dissolved: Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Romania all installed noncommunist regimes. Even then, nobody would have guessed that in another two years the Soviet Union itself would shatter into 15 pieces...
...history that the world had been forgetting. The Soviet Union was seized by a sinister anachronism: its dying self. Men with faces the color of a sidewalk talked about a "state of emergency." They rolled in tanks and told stolid lies. The world imagined another totalitarian dusk. If Gorbachev was under arrest, who had possession of the nuclear codes...
Another link was Zdenek Mlynar, who was one of the principal architects of the Prague Spring along with Dubcek. By one of history's most incredible coincidences, he had attended Moscow State University in the 1950s and shared a dorm room there with a young Russian named Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Apparently the two kept in touch, and Gorbachev was intrigued with what his former roommate was doing to reform communism in Prague. Gorbachev later said that Dubcek's reforms served as the main ideological pillars for his perestroika. When Gorbachev's spokesman Gennady Gerasimov was asked at a press conference...
...Russians copied from the Czechs all they could to free themselves of the worst tyranny ever known to man. When I asked Gorbachev's former top economic adviser, Stanislav Shatalin, why Russia did not just carbon-copy all the Czech commercial and tax codes, instead of endlessly debating how to reinvent the wheel, he replied, "Because the Czechs solve their differences in a bar over a beer, while we use knives...