Word: postcommunist
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...says the Czech presidency is an insignificant event. He regularly criticizes major E.U. policies, has refused to sign the Lisbon Treaty and dismisses E.U. climate-change legislation as a "silly luxury" that will exacerbate the international financial crisis. A 67-year-old economist who helped build the Czechs' postcommunist democracy, Klaus likens bank bailouts to "old socialism...
...shore up its currency. Three days later, the IMF agreed with the World Bank and the European Union on a $25 billion rescue package to restore confidence in Hungary, which had seen its currency plunge in recent weeks. The IMF and European leaders are also worried that, if postcommunist economies collapse, the region could return to the kind of political turmoil it has only recently shaken...
...Yeltsin: A Life, Timothy J. Colton has written a fine biography of Russia's first postcommunist President. He has done his homework, going to the Urals, for example, to talk to individuals who knew Yeltsin in his poverty-stricken childhood. One finding: a grandfather of Yeltsin's was persecuted as a rich peasant when Stalin imposed agricultural collectivization. Colton also spoke to acquaintances from Yeltsin's period as Communist Party boss in Sverdlovsk. He justifiably concludes that Yeltsin was already a rambunctious politician before Gorbachev promoted him to head the Moscow City Party in 1985. Yeltsin was like a bull...
...profit - so along with oil, food, furniture and cars, markets were established in drugs, caviar, trafficked women and counterfeit cigarettes; the networks would bring to market anything that would sell. By the mid-1990s, the U.S. government had recognized that something pretty ugly was underway in the postcommunist world. Jon Winer, the architect of the Clinton Administration's anti-organized-crime strategy, traces its development. "In '93-'94 I started working in law enforcement, knowing that globalization was beginning to have an impact on a whole range of issues," he said. "The paradigm was El Salvador. After the war, people...
Most importantly, Russia lacks a clear political identity. Beyond its economic and strategic concerns, Russia doesn't know what it wants to be. This is an ideological, even ontological lassitude. The reason the postcommunist world is so unstable is not that Russia is on the verge of repatriating old turf. It's that Russia is navigating between two ideas of Russia: its former Soviet self and its current shadow of that former self - a cartoonish, hopelessly upside-down mythology versus a dispiriting reality. Russia will not transcend this dichotomy until it begins building a truly original future instead of trying...