Word: sovietizers
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Vladimir Putin's regional roulette has many fronts but just two primary stakes: oil and pride. Russia is nursing border disputes with Norway and Japan, but the real emotional outbursts come with the former Soviet states, many of whom are sidling up to NATO or the E.U. Among the weapons wielded: troop deployments, trade embargoes and immigration quotas. Late last year Russia hiked gas and oil prices to Belarus, Georgia and Ukraine, all countries resisting the Kremlin's political embrace. With former satellites like Azerbaijan planning oil pipelines that bypass Russia, expect more hurt feelings--and more rough play...
...might remember that Europe, 50 years ago, did not pull itself back from the abyss on its own. Across the Atlantic was a nation with a pretty broad notion of neighbor. Sure, the Marshall Plan wasn't all altruism--the U.S. wanted a bulwark against Soviet expansion as the temperature of relations dropped below freezing. But it was also generosity on a scale never before seen in human history. It defined America in the cold...
...Looming over it all, however, is Arkady Gaydamak and his recently established Social Justice organization. Gaydamak is neither a politician nor military man. He is a 54-year-old emigre who started his career running a translation company in France and made his fortune in the wreckage of the Soviet empire. He says Social Justice is not a political party. Rather, it was founded "to form a common ground for the non-privileged minorities who are the majority, for the people who were always kept out of power, who have no access to the new wealth, who have no protection...
Every summer, journalists bug 87-year-old Jaroslav Ungr, former head of the socialist collective farm that once existed in the Czech village of Zajecov. When Soviet tanks rolled into what was then Czechoslovakia 39 years ago to put an end to the Prague Spring, the now white-haired man in a pink sweater and grey sweatpants was among those who welcomed the Red Army with open arms. But these days the journalists are asking not only about the Russians, but also about the Americans...
...familiar faces. In something resembling a crossover between a Woodstock reunion and an academic conference, several hundred of them - interspersed by the rare business suit - gathered at a church in downtown Prague to celebrate an act of courage they jointly undertook 30 years ago. In 1977, a decade after Soviet tanks had crushed the last flowering of free expression on their city's streets, these men and women signed Charter 77, a human-rights declaration demanding freedoms suppressed by the totalitarian communist regime in what was then Czechoslovakia...