Word: sovietize
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...outskirts of Moscow stands a giant television tower, the tallest structure in Europe. It is a tragic monument—once a symbol of Soviet power over Russian journalists but now, as new antennae make it 130 feet taller, a cosmetic triumph for the increasingly controlled Russian media. But despite the strength of this symbol, serious threats challenge the freedom of the Russian press. Russia’s lower house of parliament, the Duma, has just voted to extend new restrictions on a press that is already the subject to random raids and blackouts...
...other Communist-era sculptures, to its former place in the city’s Lubyanka Square. This immediately set off a wave of protests from outraged citizens, the Russian Orthodox Church, various human rights organizations and members of Russia’s parliament. Dzerzhinsky, you see, was to Soviet mass violence what Goering and Heinrich Himmler were to the Nazi Holocaust. After the “October Revolution” of 1917, he founded the Cheka—the Bolshevik secret police force that produced, in the words of Russian historian Orlando Figes, a “machinery of terror?...
...feared for its particularly sadistic methods of torture. These included shoving victims into tanks of boiling water, sawing their bones in half and allowing rats to eat through their internal organs. The Cheka later evolved into the infamous KGB, a similarly murderous, clandestine security organ that would paralyze the Soviet people with fear for decades...
...mayor ought to remember that when the 15-ton bronze scuplture was toppled and carried off in August 1991—during a three-day coup that heralded the final demise of the Soviet Union—grateful bystanders whistled, cheered and applauded. As Princeton University professor Kathryn Stoner-Weiss observed last month in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, “The fall of Iron Felix was a bold declaration that KGB repression would have no role in Russia’s democratic future...
...Yemen has it's own reasons for wanting to rid itself of al-Qaeda. The country sent thousands of young men to join the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and hundreds more drifted over there in the 1990s and became disciples of bin Laden. That left Yemen with one of the Arab world's largest concentrations of al-Qaeda supporters, which threatens President Saleh's plans to strengthen ties with the West. Recent suspected al-Qaeda operations in Yemen have included attacks on a French oil tanker and a U.S. oil company, underscoring the terrorist threat...