Word: soviet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Zyuganov's career as an opposition leader has been characterized by caution and measured ambition. In July 1991 he and 11 others signed an open letter titled "A Word to the People," a blistering plea to save the Soviet Union from Gorbachev's reforms. The letter, which Prokhanov wrote, marked the birth of the union between Communists and nationalists that some fear will transform Zyuganov's coalition into a Russian version of Hitler's National Socialist party. It also foreshadowed the failed coup by party hard-liners the following month. Although he proudly calls himself a "leading ideologist...
...going with Gorbachev," the Moscow airport ticket clerk says scornfully. "If I had a gun I'd kill him myself." In Russia these days, such remarks are common. The last President of the former Soviet Union is reviled by many of those he once ruled. Free-market liberals disdain his vacillating support for economic reform; Communists and nationalists detest him for his role in ending the empire. No matter. Gorbachev is waging a quixotic race for Russia's presidency and this day is heading 700 miles south of the Kremlin to plead his case in Volgograd...
Thousands of nuclear warheads, built to destroy America, have themselves been destroyed. Those that remain in Russia no longer target our homes. Three of the four nuclear states that succeeded the Soviet Union have abandoned nuclear weapons. We are working with the Yeltsin government and Russia's neighbors to keep nuclear materials from terrorists and rogue states, and to realize President Kennedy's dream of a total ban on nuclear testing. The space race has been eclipsed by our joint construction of an international space station...
Twelve new states have replaced the Soviet empire, including an independent Ukraine that is building a strong partnership with the U.S. and Europe. Russian troops no longer occupy either Central Europe or, thanks to President Clinton's personal diplomacy, the Baltic states. Instead, they are serving alongside us to bring peace to Bosnia. While we do not always agree with Russian policies, today not every difference is a crisis. We can manage the issues between us constructively without the threat of nuclear confrontation...
Then came the second period--the dissolution of the Soviet Union, capitalism's first steps. People in the West are surprised that so many Russians don't like capitalism. But there is nothing extraordinary about this. The capitalism that came to Russia at the start of the 1990s looked different from the one constructed in Europe several centuries ago. The capitalism of Holland or Switzerland was laboriously created by the industrious and thrifty bourgeois of Rotterdam or Geneva, for whom perseverance, honesty and modesty were religious commandments, acts of faith...