Word: kremlins
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...citizens of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania love to watch grainy black- and-white documentary films of what it was like 50 years ago, before their lands were seized by Stalin, invaded by Hitler, then colonized by the Kremlin. They remember themselves as having been self-reliant yet outward looking. These are among the virtues that Gorbachev is now preaching for the Soviet Union as a whole. He is a Westernizer, in the tradition of an enlightened but ultimately frustrated school of 19th century Russian reformers. The Baltics are already the most Westernized of the 15 Soviet republics, and they...
...wonder there is fear and anger in Moscow, particularly among Gorbachevites. They believe no Kremlin leader can afford to give up Soviet power, not to mention Soviet territory. Many American officials share this concern, although they must be careful about saying so. In a conceit of diplomatic formalism that until recently seemed quaint and futile, the U.S. Government has never recognized the legality of the Baltic annexation. Support for human and civil rights is, or is certainly supposed to be, a constant of American foreign policy...
...Baltic laboratory blow up any more than do the people who live there. Therefore, the American President is plugging not just for the citizens of those tragic republics trapped by history within the Soviet Union, but also for the extraordinary scientist mixing his dangerous chemicals in the Kremlin...
...Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising, were both cold war thrillers that told grand stories (grand enough that they were both # 1 bestsellers for many months) but had little to offer in terms of theme or message. His two follow-ups, Patriot Games and Cardinal of the Kremlin, struggled to escape the cold war mentality and succeeded only thanks to Clancy's knack for describing gadgets...
...decade, Communism, in the sense that Fukuyama and almost everyone else thinks about it, has been around for only 70-odd years. There were plenty of predatory tyrannies before Lenin arrived at the Finland Station, and there will be plenty more even if a Romanov is restored to a Kremlin throne. Genghis Khan and Caligula didn't need a course in dialectical materialism to make their periods of history interesting, and neither do today's bad actors -- or tomorrow...