Word: ussr
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Seven years ago the fall of the USSR and the subsequent opening of Soviet archives brought hard facts to the formerly-speculative field of Cold War studies...
...Soviet Union had not forced Czechoslovakia, which was the only democracy east of Switzerland before the Nazi invasion, into the Soviet orbit in 1948, the USSR would probably exist to this day. The Czechs, famous for their strong democratic traditions and cynical attitude towards authority, were the Trojan Horse of the Soviet empire...
...Soviets found to their chagrin that "reform communism" is an oxymoron, and since coercion and state terror were the only gluing mechanism of the USSR, any reform experiment meant to give their socialism a "human face" was bound to destroy the very pillars of that system. It was the Czechs' and Slovaks' attempts to make sense of an alien ideology during 1968, however, and its eventual crushing by Soviet hardware, that infected the Soviet Union's politics 20 years later, leading to the sensational death of a bloody tyranny...
Nunn said the USSR was the first country or empire to collapse with a large stockpile of weapons. According to Nunn, the danger that these weapons will fall into the hands of terrorists is great...
This year it is Ilya Ehrenburg's turn in the spotlight. Ehrenburg, probably unknown to most Americans only 30 years after his death, was one of the most famous Soviet writers from the 1930s to the 1960s, serving as the USSR's main cultural emissary to the West under Stalin and Khrushchev. While he wrote dozens of novels and books of verse, he became best known as a correspondent for Izvestia and other Soviet newspapers during the Spanish Civil War and World War II, when his fiercely anti-Fascist sentiments made him a favorite of Red Army soldiers...