Word: sevastopol
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Zyuganov's parents, neither of whom ever joined the party, were schoolteachers. His father Andrei, a peaceful man whose hobby was beekeeping, nearly lost his right leg to a German bullet in the fighting near Sevastopol and walked with a severe limp for the rest of his life. Like much of rural Russia, Mymrino still lacks plumbing and paved roads. The region suffered from the mass arrests and forced collectivization of Stalin's time, although you won't hear Zyuganov talk about that when he rhapsodizes about Russia's rural past in his speeches...
...been arguing for more than a year over what to do about the powerful 350-ship Black Sea fleet of the former Soviet navy. Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Ukraine President Leonid Kravchuk reached a solution: they will split the fleet down the middle. The fleet's port in Sevastopol, Ukraine, will be shared as well. Russia also agreed officially to guarantee Ukraine's security, a condition Kravchuk has insisted on before giving up his 1,900-warhead nuclear arsenal...
...might degenerate into a violent conflict, the West has been pressuring both sides to come to terms peacefully. Russian President Boris Yeltsin recently took a step in that direction, announcing that Moscow had dropped its insistence that the 380-ship Black Sea Fleet, based in the Crimean port of Sevastopol, was a "strategic force" that should fall under joint Commonwealth command...
...Yeltsin argued for central control over all this too, but Ukraine, Moldavia and Azerbaijan insisted that they had to have their own national armies. Most Soviet naval bases were in Russia, but Ukraine was quick to claim the Black Sea Fleet, which had its home port in Ukraine's Sevastopol. Without warning, Russia ordered the newest aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, to its port of Murmansk. Yeltsin later defended the transfer, noting that the Black Sea Fleet was "historically Russian." But he grudgingly conceded that Ukraine is entitled to "a share" of the Black Sea Fleet...
Those defeats were followed by two other stunning losses. On June 7 German forces supplemented by troops from Romania began a monthlong final offensive against the great Crimean port of Sevastopol, pounding it with Luftwaffe raids before sending infantry units to wage bloody street battles. By the beginning of July, the city collapsed. The fall of Rostov-on-Don, the so-called gateway to the Caucasus, was even more ominous. The siege was embarrassingly brief, and whole Soviet units reportedly fled in panic. Suddenly the way south to the oil fields of Baku was open. With German armies simultaneously dashing...