Word: sovietize
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This week marks the anniversary of both the Cold War's nadir, the construction of the Berlin Wall, and its end with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Hugh Sidey writes on one of its lowest points, with President Kennedy at the construction of the Berlin Wall. Moscow bureau chief Paul Quinn-Judge remembers what the city was like in August 1991, when the hard-liners made their last desperate push to retain power. Tony Karon argues that Russians, at least materially, were better off under the Soviet state. And in an award-winning photo essay, photographer Anthony Suau looks...
Like the Joker to Batman or Lex Luthor to Superman, the Soviet Union gave America its post-war identity - by being its living antithesis. And the mortal struggle between the two defined and organized the wider world in which they lived, and their place and purpose in it. No surprise then that the optimism that greeted the Soviet Union's sudden collapse a decade ago has long-since given way to a profound identity crisis on both sides of the old divide...
...communism's huddled masses; instead most Russians today are considerably worse off than they had been under the red flag. No individual more memorably personified Russian antipathy to communism than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the writer who turned his horrific experiences inside Stalin's gulag into the defining novel of the Soviet era. And if Solzhenitsyn was a moral compass for Russian anti-communism, then his views on post-Soviet Russia offer pause for thought: "One might have imagined that things could not have got worse than the point to which Communism had brought us," Solzhenitsyn recently told the New Yorker...
...Solzhenitsyn excoriated the West for supporting and guiding Moscow's first post-Soviet leader through an economic reform program that devastated Russia, and for lauding him as a champion of democracy even as he shelled his own parliament building and created an autocratic regime. For Solzhenitsyn, as for hundreds of millions of his countrymen, the post-Soviet years have been a mostly unmitigated disaster. Forty percent of Russians live in poverty today, ten times more than in 1991; the daily average calorie consumption has fallen by almost half since the mid-1980s, to a level below the World Health Organization...
...None of this, of course, detracts from the epic significance of the Soviet Union's collapse. It closed the book on an unhappy epoch and heralded the dawn of one brimming with boundless potential for expanding human freedom, realizing human potential and improving the quality of human life. There has been, and still is, great promise - even if, ten years on, most of it remains to be fulfilled...