Word: sovietize
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Lebedev seems an unlikely person to make that case. A few weeks earlier, near the center of Moscow in a stately pink building where he sometimes works and sleeps, Lebedev gave me a condensed history of the Russian state since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 - the beginnings of post-Soviet capitalism, the rise of the oligarchs, the loans-for-shares scandal, his acquisition of National Reserve Bank, the rise of Putin, the fall of the oligarchs, his 28% stake in Aeroflot, the Khodorkovsky affair, the forthcoming launch of his restaurant in London, the end of democracy...
...Gulag Memorial project," Lebedev says. (Memorial was the most important human-rights group to emerge from the perestroika era. For years it has pushed for a monument in the center of Moscow recalling the victims of the gulag.) Putin, Lebedev says, would never back anything that subtracted from the Soviet record. "I think Putin thinks that this commemoration would spoil the everyday spirit," Lebedev says. "Stalin, for them, represents the state, and sometimes you can see Putin as sort of - in that way." (See pictures of Putin...
...Lebedev the reformer he sees himself as, or does he play another role? "There's a belief - and this existed in Soviet times - that allowing a pressure valve of dissent and allowing certain voices out there is important for legitimacy," says Robert Amsterdam, a Canadian attorney in London who has represented Khodorkovsky and frequently blogs about Russia. "In a strange way, and whether or not Lebedev is part of this, he may well be seen as a demonstration of the regime's legitimacy." As long as he doesn't "cross any of these invisible lines, Lebedev may actually shield...
...loathes the Chinese - whom he accuses of involvement in prostitution and drug-trafficking - and reveres Genghis Khan, who he says influenced Adolf Hitler. I ask him if he considers his adoption of the beliefs of a regime that singled out and executed people with Mongol features from among Soviet prisoners of war to be in any way ironic. "It doesn't matter," he shrugs. "We share the same policies...
...decade, it supported coups and assassinations in places such as Guatemala and the Dominican Republic to install leaders considered sympathetic to U.S. interests. Despite this legacy, many Americans were unaware of the CIA's clandestine operations until May 1960, when a U-2 spy plane was downed over the Soviet Union. The folks in Langley, Va., suffered another collective black eye from the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba the following year...