Word: kremlins
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...Saakashvili's earliest political promises in 2004 was to get Abkhazia and South Ossetia back in Georgia's fold. Both territories had turned to Russia for protection after a bloody civil war in the early 1990s, however, and the Kremlin had little incentive to broker a peace. Instead, it began to use unrest there to undermine Saakashvili's courtship of NATO, which he wanted Georgia to join. Saakashvili told me that from the outset, any talk he had with then Russian President Vladimir Putin on the breakaway territories was met with warnings about his relationship to the West: "The first...
...blame the former leadership who started all this." The dilemma may sound familiar as the Obama Administration weighs General Stanley McChrystal's request for 40,000 more troops, but the quote comes from Mikhail Gorbachev, Secretary-General of the Soviet Communist Party, during a debate that raged in the Kremlin during 1986 and 1987. Moscow was grappling with some of the same issues eight years after the Red Army invaded Afghanistan that President Obama today faces, eight years after U.S. troops went in. And eavesdropping, retrospectively, on the Soviet debate on Afghanistan offers some uncomfortable parallels. (See TIME's photo...
...Pakistan was also a key feature of the discussion in both the White House and the Kremlin, although their conclusions differed. "There's no way we're going to be able to close the Afghanistan-Pakistan border," Gromyko declared in February 1987, "so we need to end this war." (Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen warned last month, "We have this safe haven in a sovereign country that is threatening, plotting against Americans and other Western countries, and it must be eliminated.") See TIME's photo-essay "On the Frontlines in the Battle Against the Taliban...
...same became largely true for other totalitarian states, including the Soviet Union, with its phalanxes of tanks and high-tech missiles streaming past the Kremlin every May Day. Elaborately choreographed events known as Mass Games, involving countless dancers and volunteers, are a particular legacy of communism: they still go on with regularity in North Korea, where tens of thousands train for months and act out with mechanical precision surreal tableaux lauding the isolated rogue state's shadowy leadership...
...Kremlin, always eager to stomp out political rivalry, nationalize industry and control the flow of gas and oil, may have its reservations about globalization, with all its inherent unpredictability. But the future of Khabarovsk - riddled with sushi bars, Internet cafes, boutique hotels and endless streams of Chinese and Korean tourists - is not in Moscow. For now, most of the Moscow nomenklatura don't seem to get this. That's why they keep having forums and talking about Air Force bases and throwing back shots of Ruskiy Standart at the Parus Hotel...