Word: sovietism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...when Lowell House was being built, plans called for the tower to feature four clocks. But a faculty member, travelling in the Soviet Union, discovered a set of 400-year-old bells from St. Danilov's monastery that Stalin planned to melt for ammunition. The man wired Harvard to stop construction immediately, and arranged to have the bells shipped...
...there, right? The star, the premise, the gimmick (those guns fire the laser version of smart bombs), the no-brainer plot, even a glimpse of the bad-guys-of-the-moment, Russian criminals who have emerged, fire-toughened, from the ashes of the Soviet Union. The movie, as many have observed, even borrows the sure-fire elements of "Mission: Impossible": infiltration of a supposedly impregnable government sanctum, corrupt government execs...
Lebed, a professional soldier all his life, has an image as a rough-hewn nationalist and patriot. As an airborne commander in Afghanistan, Tbilisi and the former Soviet republic of Moldova, he was famous for using force first and asking questions later, if at all. His troops wielded shovels to crack civilian skulls in rebellious Georgia and let fly with heavy artillery to protect Russian separatists from ethnic Moldovans. He was also fairly insubordinate. "He smashed the Russian army tradition of servility to superiors," says Colonel Victor Baranets, a staff officer at the Defense Ministry. "He calls a spade...
Since this purge the two most visible figures on the Kremlin stage after the President are Lebed and Chubais, a seemingly odd couple. Chubais is despised by large segments of the population for his role in dismantling the old Soviet industrial complex. Others admire his management of the program that put two-thirds of Russian enterprises into private hands, and in the West he is lionized for this achievement. After the Communists won most of the seats in the legislative elections last December, however, Yeltsin fired Chubais as a sacrifice. He took the humiliation, then bounced back in February...
...leading American-Jewish organization. Netanyahu's views on foreign policy were formed by his father, who expounded the muscular Revisionist school of Zionism, but associates say American right-wingers reinforced these opinions. A former Likud official recalls that Netanyahu was much impressed by Ronald Reagan's approach to the Soviet Union, and an Israeli official sees a continuum of influence from Netanyahu's father through Kirkpatrick and others. "His was a one-line, continuous education," the official says...