Word: sovietizers
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...manages to do so, and that there is no military intervention in Iran of the kind that Israel visited upon Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. What would happen next? Somehow or other, in all likelihood, others would seek to contain Iran, in the way that the Soviet Union was contained during the cold war. But if that was to be the fate of Iran, who would do the containing? To ask the question is to answer it. "There is an assumption," says Michael Mandelbaum, of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University...
...kick off promisingly when Gazprom, Russia’s Kremlin-owned energy monopoly, interrupted Ukraine’s natural gas flow through the ironically named “Brotherhood” pipeline. Ever since the downfall of the USSR, former satellite Soviet republics have benefited from heavily subsidized gas prices. Wanting to update Ukraine’s access to “international standards,” Gazprom raised the price of gas from $50 per thousand cubic meters to $230. The more than 400-percent increase was cleverly couched in the Western language of free trade and open international...
...from an independent company. In fact, Dmitry Medvedev, a close friend of President Putin and the first deputy prime minister of Russia, chairs the “corporation.” In the last months, this behemoth bought, in a throwback to good ol’ Soviet times, curious assets to “complete its portfolio”: Izvestia, a money-losing newspaper, and NTV, a leading TV network formerly owned by one of Putin’s rapidly vanishing rivals. This cold New Year, the company was used for a 21st-century taste of realpolitik...
...truth about the frigid feelings between Moscow to Kiev lies beneath: retaliation for last year’s Orange Revolution, which was built on the premise to take the country away from the Kremlin’s spheres of influence. Former Soviet republic Belarus, on the other hand, has an authoritarian government keen on close relationships with Moscow and still enjoys cheap energy. Thus, gas from murky companies like Gazprom flows with political scents—and according to Putin’s desires...
Catherine the Great once said that because of the size of the country, “the sovereign must be autocratic,” crystallizing the perennial Russian dilemma between authoritarian regimes and revolutions. Putin once deemed the fall of the Soviet Union the greatest political catastrophe of the century; the world hopes he won’t try to emulate what was lost under Mikhail Gorbachev. Gazprom’s New Year surprise, however, shows a future as dark as oil, and as volatile as natural...