Word: ironic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...confirmed what I'd often been told: Soviet military officers are no men on horseback, forever overthrowing political authorities. To be sure, pluralism in the Soviet Union brought out the worst in the army. Senior officers grumbled publicly about reform, and some called for the use of an iron fist. Yet when the crunch came, the army and many of its leaders, including the new Minister of Defense, General Yevgeni Shaposhnikov, stayed on the sidelines. Thus the Soviet army still has a chance to find a place in a stable and democratic successor to the communist Soviet Union. If that...
...Iron Curtain made European integration a relatively simple matter, at least in concept: the rich democracies of the West were eligible for / membership in this new club, the European Community; the poor dictatorships to the east were not. But now the Community's neighbors -- newly liberated, thoroughly European and desperately needy -- will request, and deserve, some kind of special association...
...past two years -- and not just the past two weeks -- have put Hall's beliefs to the test. The Iron Curtain opened, and the Berlin Wall toppled. Eastern Europe gained its freedom, and the Germanys united. Capitalists started selling Big Macs in Pushkin Square. Now come the failed coup, the dismantling of the Soviet Communist Party and the race toward independence and a market economy. While conceding that these events mark a "serious detour," Hall finds solace in this quote: "If current events are negative, then look long range...
Since before he started shaving, Hall, whose parents were charter members of the Communist Party U.S.A., has been steeped in the revolution. Born Arvo Kusta Halberg, son of a carpenter in Minnesota's iron range, he went to work after the eighth grade as a lumberjack to help support his family. Long hours in the deep woods at a dollar a day educated him. "Working in lumber camps in those days," he recalls, "would make a communist out of anybody." He joined the party in 1927 and spent several years in the early 1930s at Moscow's Marx- Engels-Lenin...
...past decades thousands of citizens came face to face with state power -- and often terror. So it was with some trepidation that a massive crowd advanced into the square in the aftermath of the failed coup -- but its nerve soon strengthened. Within hours, thousands cheered as the statue of "Iron Felix" Dzherzhinsky, who founded the secret police immediately after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, was toppled from its central pedestal. It was a symbolic act of purgation -- and revenge...