Word: sovietizers
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...Descendents of the Mongol armies that swept through what is now southern Russia and Ukraine in the 13th century, the Muslim Tatar khans ruled the Crimean peninsula until it was annexed by Russia in 1783. A summer holiday destination during the Soviet period and still home to Russia's Black Sea Fleet, many Russians see Crimea as part of their country, a fact that rankles the Tatars...
...parliament and the leader of the Tatars' unofficial parliament, the Mejlis. "Some Russian newspapers [in Crimea] publish such nasty rubbish about Tatars. There are provocations against us, but it's not our culture to respond to these with violence." Jemilev, who spent 15 years in prison camps during the Soviet period for campaigning for Tatar rights, contends that Russia is handing out Russian passports in the Crimea and could try to provoke the Tatars into providing a pretext to "protect" Russians, as it did in the Georgian enclave of South Ossetia last year. That invasion led many political analysts...
...hundreds of private companies - including several local subsidiaries of U.S. corporations - and taxed American products so heavily that U.S. exports were halved in just two years. The Eisenhower Administration responded by imposing trade restrictions on everything except food and medical supplies. Decrying "Yankee imperialism," Castro expanded trade with the Soviet Union instead. The U.S. responded by cutting all diplomatic ties, and the two countries have been talking through Switzerland ever since. President Kennedy issued the permanent embargo on Feb. 7, 1962 - right after ordering a shipment of 1,200 Cuban cigars for himself - and within a few years the country...
...darkest moment in the countries' relationship came on the morning of October 15, 1962 when U.S. spy planes discovered evidence that the Soviet Union was building missile bases in Cuba. President Kennedy learned of the threat the following morning, while still in pajamas, and for the next 12 days the U.S. and Russia were locked in a white-knuckled nuclear face-off - the Cuban Missile Crisis - that ended only when Nikita Khrushchev accepted Kennedy's secret proposal to remove U.S. missiles in Turkey in exchange for the de-arming of Cuba. The Soviet missiles were gone within six months...
...Somalia's extreme poverty and lack of effective central government make it an ideal breeding ground for piracy, and the Cold War's end helped make it possible. Like Afghanistan, Somalia was for decades a rope in the tug-of-war between the Soviet Union and the U.S., later abandoned and left to rot as the superpowers' rivalry ebbed. It's the latest warning that the 21st century's dangers are more likely to come from failed states and their desperate young men rather than modern militaries boasting flotillas of warships, formations of tanks and fleets of aircraft...