Word: sovietism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...plan had worked--and it came fearfully close--Nikita Khrushchev, the bellicose Premier of the Soviet Union, would in one mighty stroke have changed the power balance of the Cold War. Once again, a foreign dictator had seemingly misread the character of the U.S. and of a U.S. President. At Vienna and later, Khrushchev had sized up Kennedy as a weakling, given to strong talk and timorous action. The U.S. itself, he told Poet Robert Frost, was "too liberal to fight." Now, in the Caribbean, he intended to prove his point. And Berlin would surely come next...
Kennedy shattered those illusions. He did it with a series of dramatic decisions that swiftly brought the U.S. to a showdown not with Fidel Castro but with Khrushchev's own Soviet Union...
From the international point of view, perhaps the chief fact about the invasion is that, far from strengthening Soviet-style Communism, Moscow has further crippled it. Acting on the flimsiest and most cynical of pretexts, Warsaw Pact troops throttled the infant independence of a state that had reiterated its fidelity to Moscow and Communism. To retain its grip on Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union had sacrificed much of its influence among Communist parties elsewhere. Not since the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 had the Kremlin acted so palpably from fear and weakness...
...reversed itself so totally. The 1980s began with the worst U.S. inflation in 60 years and a deepening dread of nuclear annihilation. As they closed, inflation was making a last and unsuccessful assault on an economy that had found new resources, the Berlin Wall was tumbling down, and the Soviet empire was dissolving. The cold war was over--and the West...
Beneath the surface, though, the alignment of forces was shifting. Reagan's big military buildup, and in particular his widely derided attempt to create a Star Wars antimissile defense, were putting heavy pressure on the Soviet Union to keep up. Moscow was vulnerable because the Soviet economy was decaying badly, and its leadership was nearly paralyzed. Only in 1985, after three Kremlin funerals in three years, did a leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, emerge who was realistic and vigorous enough to attempt drastic reforms...