Word: sovietism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...flocked to Chernobyl Friday to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the deadliest accident in the history of commercial atomic power. Ten years ago, an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine spewed lethal radiation killing at least 30 people and affecting thousands more across the then-Soviet Union and Europe. On April 26, 1986 the blast at unit no. 4 caused a nuclear meltdown, with blazes burning at temperatures of up to 5000 Fahrenheit, or twice that of molten steel. The reactor burned for two weeks slowly releasing dangerous radioactivity into the air. The radiation, carried...
...heady promise of peace had already been submerged by the cold war: the specter of Soviet subversion, real and imagined, at home; the threat of nuclear holocaust ominous enough to send schoolchildren diving under their desks at a teacher's practice command. (I remember studying an aerial photo of New York City, on which concentric circles described the effects of an H-bomb blast over the Empire State Building, and feeling a sense of doom that I lived four blocks inside the zone of vaporization...
...optimism. We were smack in the middle of a full-tilt boom, with steady growth, full employment, no inflation, balanced federal budgets as a matter of course, a constantly rising standard of living, low crime rates, stable families. Yet over our heads, Sputnik was circling the earth, an implacable Soviet Union seemed to be on the offensive, and the worry was powerful enough to encourage John Kennedy to run for President warning of America's shrinking prestige in the world. Later, presidential chronicler Theodore White would write that "1960 was a year of national concern--but vague, shapeless, unsettling, undefinable...
...democrats in parliament a few years ago. Zyuganov is calling on all "patriots" to rally around his banner in the cause of a powerful Russian state, an alternative to the West. His basic appeal is to all who feel anger, pain and shame at the demise of the great Soviet Union and the decline of their own personal fortunes. One recruit is Alexei Podberyozkin, chairman of a patriotic political organization called the Spiritual Heritage Movement, who argues, "Russia is an empire. It is Russia's historic fate that it cannot exist on any other scale." Says General Makashov: "Russia will...
Talk of postponement is already in the air. Last month the communist-dominated Duma voted to abrogate the 1991 agreement by which the former Soviet Union had been dissolved. Though the measure carried no legal weight, an infuriated Yeltsin denounced it as "scandalous" and charged that the deputies had "destroyed the foundation on which they were sitting." The import of this ominous but vague outburst was soon made clear by a group of regional leaders in the upper house of parliament who support Yeltsin. Responding to the Duma's action, they proposed that the election be postponed for at least...