Word: sovietism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...summit in Germany, Russian President Boris Yeltsin handed President Clinton what could be a new treasure trove of information (or perhaps just false gold): A declassified Russian dossier concerning the 1963 assassination of JFK. The documents are in Russian and apparently concern Lee Harvey Oswald?s travels to the Soviet Union as well as the Soviet government?s reaction to the killing. Kennedy enthusiasts hope the information will yield new insights about Oswald?s life in Minsk in the early 1960s and any possible ties he may have had with Soviet authorities...
...risk everything in battle against the two great threats to civilization in the second half of this century: nuclear war and communist dictatorship. In the dark, bitter depths of the cold war, Sakharov's voice rang out. "A miracle occurred," Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, "when Andrei Sakharov emerged in the Soviet state, among the swarms of corrupt, venal, unprincipled intelligentsia." By the time of his death in 1989, this humble physicist had influenced the spread of democratic ideals throughout the communist world. His moral challenge to tyranny, his faith in the individual and the power of reason, his courage...
...growing awareness of the deadly effects of nuclear fallout soon turned him against proliferation. His efforts to persuade Khrushchev to halt tests in the late '50s and early '60s resulted in the 1963 U.S.-Soviet treaty banning nuclear explosions in space, in the atmosphere and underwater. Khrushchev later called Sakharov "a crystal of morality"--but still one that could not be tolerated within the regime. The Kremlin took away his security privileges and ended his career as a nuclear physicist. But, Sakharov later said, "the atomic issue was a natural path into political issues." He campaigned for disarmament and turned...
Outside the Soviet Union, even in China, where his writings were predictably banned by the government, Sakharov's name and struggle were familiar to intellectuals and dissidents forging their own fights against authority. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, and in 1980 his arrest and exile to the remote city of Gorky (now called Nizhni Novgorod) made him a martyr. His refusal to be silenced even in banishment added to his legend. And then came the rousing finale: his release and hero's return to Moscow in 1986; his relentless prodding of Mikhail Gorbachev to pursue democratization...
What is Sakharov's legacy today? With the cold war ended and the Soviet threat gone, his exhortations against totalitarianism might seem anachronistic. Yet in China, where political freedom continues to be suppressed and intellectuals face harassment and arrest, his voice is still one of encouragement. For scientists his career remains a model of the moral responsibility that must accompany innovation. And Sakharov might remind the West too that freedom is fragile, that if democratic societies are not protective of their liberties, even they may lose it. On the night of his death, after returning from a tempestuous meeting...