Word: sovietism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Soviet Union has formidable reserves of resiliency, as it showed during the crisis of Hitler's invasion. But what if the dark forebodings of a Soviet screenwriter came true...
...sneak preview of the latest Tom Clancy effulgence? Hardly. This frightening scenario of Soviet collapse, titled Nevozraschenets (The Non- Returnee), was published last June in Iskusstvo Kino, the official journal of the Soviet movie industry. Its appearance reflects a mood of unprecedented pessimism and self-doubt, in which intellectuals and political figures have been speculating somberly about the catastrophes that could befall the Soviet Union if perestroika falls apart. Last September, for example, political oppositionist Boris Yeltsin, a former Moscow party boss, repeatedly warned of an impending disaster. "We are on the edge of an abyss," Yeltsin told a rapt...
...ramifications of this possibility are so serious that they ought to worry the West more than they do. Would a complete Soviet collapse, after all, be a good or a bad thing...
Riding atop the economic woes is the horseman of ethnic anarchy amid the 15 national republics that constitute the Soviet Union. Armenia and Azerbaijan are nearly at war with each other, Moldavia has been crippled by ethnically inspired strikes, Georgians are demanding an end to the "Soviet empire," and in Lithuania the Communist Party has abolished its own monopoly of power, the most striking sign of Baltic nationalism to date...
Such radicalism would not be possible without Gorbachev's glasnost. But the new openness in the Soviet media has also exposed irrational superstitions reminiscent of the last days of Czar Nicholas II. The TASS news agency reports with a straight face that aliens stepped out of UFOs in Voronezh. On TV, psychic healers appear frequently with supposed cures for everything from obesity to detached retinas. As in all periods of great stress, the Christian churches in Russia have seldom been fuller...