Word: sovietism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...unlikely history will forget the period, thanks to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the break-up of the Soviet Union and the Persian Gulf War. But in music, you'd think there was a jump from the upbeat Top 40 of Reagan's America--epitomized in Madonna's "Material Girl" (1984)--to the brooding alternative explosion of Clinton's '90s, marked by Nirvana's breakthrough hit "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (1991). In making that leap you'd skip both the George Bush years and the apex of a key musical genre: the power ballad...
...series of summits, Gorbachev and Reagan brought about a de-escalation of the arms race, which the Soviet leader realized was swallowing more resources than he could afford. The European satellites were too, so Gorbachev told their chiefs that Soviet tanks would no longer keep them in power. That started a chain reaction that left both sides dumbfounded. By the end of 1989, the Soviet bloc had dissolved: Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Romania all installed noncommunist regimes. Even then, nobody would have guessed that in another two years the Soviet Union itself would shatter into 15 pieces...
...abyss opened for a moment, and black bats flew out. They filled the air with old nightmares, throwbacks to a style of history that the world had been forgetting. The Soviet Union was seized by a sinister anachronism: its dying self. Men with faces the color of a sidewalk talked about a "state of emergency." They rolled in tanks and told stolid lies. The world imagined another totalitarian dusk. If Gorbachev was under arrest, who had possession of the nuclear codes...
...waning months of the 1980s, a Sovietologist named Francis Fukuyama published a provocative essay called "The End of History?" Fukuyama's thesis--that the collapse of the Soviet Union meant people would have nothing more to fight wars about--was soon disproved. The 1990s have not been short on history. The end of the cold war defrosted earlier rivalries that had been frozen for two generations, bringing bloody history back to places like Bosnia, where it had been in cold storage...
...PARTIES! Another says, THANK YOU, CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE CPSU, FOR THE LIGHT OF CHERNOBYL, WHICH HAS ILLUMINATED THE ENTIRE COUNTRY AND IMMERSED IT INTO DARKNESS. And then there is the one proclaiming, I HAVE A DEVILISH DESIRE FOR A BIT OF SAUSAGE. LUDMILLA THORNE, Director Soviet Studies, Freedom House New York City...