Word: sovietize
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...blue-and-gold Lufthansa jetliner rolled to a stop at Cologne airport late last week, the waiting crowd broke into a cheer. Out stepped Foreign Minister Walter Scheel. He brought home from Moscow two red-bound leather volumes containing a renunciation-of-force treaty between West Germany and the Soviet Union that he and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had initialed only a few hours earlier. Perhaps unconsciously, Scheel spoke of accord in a phrase reminiscent of Bismarck's famed injunction to keep the line open to St. Petersburg, then Imperial Russia's capital. Said Scheel: "We have...
...through the heart of the beaten country. While West Germany became a part of the Western defense and economic system and made, in effect, a separate peace with the Western Allies, Bonn's relations with the East bloc remained in a state of suspended hostilities. Bonn was the Soviet Union's chief whipping boy in Europe; the fear of renascent Germany was the most persuasive Russian rationale for the continued presence of Soviet forces throughout Eastern Europe. West Germany's diplomatic claims, which included the right to represent East Germany in international affairs and demands for lands...
...west has very self-interested reasons for Kazakh democracy. Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic in central Asia, is a major supplier of hydrocarbons. No less vital is predominantly Muslim Kazakhstan's unique potential as a stable, modernized and religiously tolerant secular state in a volatile region threatened by Islamic extremism. For 16 years, Nazarbayev has been using unlimited powers to vigorously pursue liberal economic reforms and achieve economic stability - much at the expense of political freedoms. However, the regime has grown too rigid and politically bottlenecked to ensure long-term stability and further growth. Both Kazakhstan and Western politicians have...
...Afghanistan, they are making an army from enemies. During the country's civil war nearly two decades ago, Ahmad Zai Waris and Zubir Ahmad fought on opposite sides of the lines, Waris heading a mujahedin group determined to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan and Ahmad as a soldier fighting for the Soviet-backed government. Now Waris and Ahmad live together on a military base in Afghanistan's eastern province of Kunar, hard against the Pakistan border. They often stay up late talking about guerrilla tactics of the past and how to use them against their new, shared adversary...
...Such complaints are unlikely to mean much in a Russia growing prosperous off its abundant oil and natural gas reserves. But while Moscow puts post-Soviet poverty behind it, the residents of Sakhalin are experiencing the energy boom in a manner familiar to many citizens of oil-rich nations. "I'm a native," says Vasili Plotnikov, a pensioner who owns a tiny country shack just a few miles from the massive LNG terminal. "I don't see any plus. I only see negatives." Maybe Chekhov's hell wasn't so bad, after...