Word: sovietization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power upon the death of his predecessor in the Soviet Union, many Republicans - both Reagan Administration officials and conservative intellectuals - dismissed him as a phony reformer who was only trying to save the Soviet regime. Yet Gorbachev found himself setting in motion processes that he could not control, leading to the rise of Boris Yeltsin, a more radical reformer, and to the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself. No one knows, of course, whether a leader such as Mousavi, who indeed has shared the mullahs hostility toward the U.S., would follow such a pattern...
...Lukashenko has been increasingly turning his back on Russia, slowly allying his country with the West. So far, the move seems to be paying off. Belarus was included in the E.U.'s Eastern Partnership initiative, created last year to strengthen economic and political ties between Europe and six former Soviet states. Lukashenko's travel ban to Europe - issued after his 2006 re-election, which the U.S. and the E.U. maintain was rigged - has been lifted. And Belarus secured an additional $1 billion on a $2.4 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after Russia canceled its final $500 million...
...past, the SCO has worked to stave off the threat of Islamist militancy in Central Asia, but it declared in 2005 that all U.S. military bases in the region's post-Soviet republics must have a timeline for withdrawal - a move on both Beijing and Moscow's part to stymie U.S. influence. Already, the U.S.'s pivotal Manas air base in Kyrgyzstan has been ordered to cease operations...
...Borat or an exotic waypoint of horse markets and mutton skewers, the region has been cast off as a dysfunctional Russian annex, easily manipulated by a Kremlin that still views these young republics as satellite states. From Ashgabat to Astana, the ruling elites are all holdovers from the Soviet era, and sometimes more fluent in Russian than their national tongues. "Their regimes operate," says Eric McGlinchey, a Central Asia specialist and professor of politics and government at George Mason University, "along almost pathological networks of patronage" - and ones that Moscow knows how to navigate. That close working relationship has been...
...That translates into a somewhat depressing reality for the over 50 million people living in the region. The world's "freedom rankings" compiled by Freedom House, a Washington D.C.-based human rights NGO, place all five of the post-Soviet 'Stans near the bottom. Independent media is almost non-existent. Human rights activists are frequently detained and tortured, and many others live in exile. Even in Kyrgyzstan, where a so-called "velvet" revolution toppled the ruling president in 2005, the subsequent government has done little to distinguish itself from the past. "Central Asians tolerate an awful lot," says Roberts. "They...