Word: sovietism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...over 45 years and all across the globe as it explains and makes vivid this sprawling, complicated conflict. It features interviews with ordinary people as well as leaders like George Bush and Fidel Castro. Equally important, the series lets us hear from the mid-level officials (the commander of Soviet forces in Afghanistan, for example) who have the grittiest knowledge of how policy was actually carried out. There is narration, tautly delivered by Kenneth Branagh, but the story is told primarily through film footage of events and the recollections of participants. The filmmakers have combined these materials so that each...
...intensity and even humor. Interlocking his fingers to illustrate the mutual grip of terror, Robert McNamara explains deterrence and seems amazed himself at the doctrine's horrifying logic. In the episode on detente, Winston Lord, an aide to Henry Kissinger during the Nixon Administration, describes a summit at which Soviet leaders spend hours hectoring the Americans over Vietnam but then, having created a record to send to Hanoi, turn jovial and break out the vodka...
...very pleased," says Gaddis. "One can always find portions with something this big and this extensive that one might have done differently. But I think it's fair and accurately reflects current cold-war scholarship." A recent finding from Soviet archives, for example, is that the Soviet leaders held their ideological views far more strongly than Western analysts had thought. The result was that the Soviets often acted against their best interests, mystifying those in the West, who believed the Soviets had a rational and cunning master plan. Comments in the series by former Soviet officials illustrate this new thesis...
Conservatives have always charged Turner with being too sympathetic to the Soviets on account of his commercial ties with them, his sponsorship of the Goodwill Games and his other efforts to improve relations between the superpowers. Since one of his requirements for Cold War was that it show an understanding of the Soviets' position as well as the West's, the series will come under extra scrutiny. "The idea," says Isaacs, was "to tell the story of the cold war not wrapped in Old Glory but from the viewpoints of both protagonists." The neutral tone may perturb those who desire...
...Russia's new Prime Minister, Yevgeny Primakov, once headed the Soviet equivalent of the CIA. Who now heads...