Word: sovietizers
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...first in a projected trilogy about dictators. The second installment, Shah of Shahs, traces the rise and fall of Iran's Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Kapuscinski labored for years on a third volume, about Uganda's Idi Amin, but apparently could not find words for his excesses. When the Soviet Union foundered in the late 1980s, he abandoned Amin and headed for Moscow. The result, Imperium, is a perceptive travelogue-memoir of living under communism and watching it collapse. Another Day of Life is a harrowing account of the 1970s Angolan civil war; The Shadow of the Sun contains the best...
...Chechnya reversed the ambiguous trend toward democracy in Russia. Mercilessly waged by Putin with extraordinary brutality, it not only crushed a small nation long victimized by Russian and then Soviet imperialism but also led to political repression and greater authoritarianism inside Russia and fueled chauvinism among Russia's people. Putin exploited his success in stabilizing the chaotic post-Soviet society by restoring central control over political life. The war in Chechnya became his personal crusade, a testimonial to the restoration of Kremlin clout...
...Russia can do what it wishes, especially in its geopolitical backyard. The first has led Moscow to take malicious slaps at America's tarnished superpower status, propelled by feel-good expectations of the U.S.'s further slide. One should not underestimate Russia's resentment over the fall of the Soviet Union (Putin has called it the greatest disaster of the 20th century) and its hope that the U.S. will suffer the same fate. Indeed, Kremlin strategists surely relish the thought of a U.S. deeply bogged down not only in Iraq but also in a war with Iran, which would trigger...
...pleases on the international scene--is also ominous. It has already tempted Moscow to intimidate newly independent Georgia; reverse the gains of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; wage aggressive cyberwar against E.U. member Estonia after the Estonians dared to remove from the center of their capital a monument celebrating Soviet domination of their country; impose an oil embargo on Lithuania; monopolize international access to the energy resources of Central Asia. In all these cases, the U.S., consumed as it is by the war in Iraq, has been rather passive. U.S. policy toward Russia has been more grandiloquent than strategic...
...reminiscent of Nigeria, as corruption and money laundering fritter away a great deal of the country's wealth. To an extent, Russia can use its vast profits to get its way. But buying influence, even in Washington (where money goes a long way), cannot match the clout the Soviet Union once enjoyed as the beacon of an ideology with broad international appeal...