Word: war
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...stage Five-Year Plan to improve the economy that Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov unveiled last week reflected the tug-of-war going on within the leadership. Ryzhkov made clear that his approach represented a "third alternative" to making minor corrections in central planning or plunging headlong into a free-market economy. Over the next two years, he said, the state intended to use "rigid directive measures" to reduce the national deficit from about 10% to 2.5% of GNP and increase supplies of consumer goods. A real market with varied forms of property ownership would take shape after 1992, he added, when...
...Yeltsin, a former Moscow party boss, repeatedly warned of an impending disaster. "We are on the edge of an abyss," Yeltsin told a rapt audience at New York's Council on Foreign Relations. Yeltsin gave Gorbachev until next fall to produce results. Others have warned of an actual civil war by then...
Riding atop the economic woes is the horseman of ethnic anarchy amid the 15 national republics that constitute the Soviet Union. Armenia and Azerbaijan are nearly at war with each other, Moldavia has been crippled by ethnically inspired strikes, Georgians are demanding an end to the "Soviet empire," and in Lithuania the Communist Party has abolished its own monopoly of power, the most striking sign of Baltic nationalism to date...
...Cuba or Najibullah's Afghanistan would probably wither quickly, as might many Third World Communist insurgencies. The U.S. economy would benefit handsomely from vastly reduced defense expenditures. But the blessings of a Soviet collapse would certainly be mixed. Just as the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I led to Hitler's brutal exploitation of the resulting power vacuum, so the end of the Pax Sovietica in Eurasia might touch off an ethnic bloodbath among the squabbling successor regimes. For University of Alabama historian Hugh Ragsdale, a Soviet collapse would lead to a disastrous "Balkanization" of Eurasia...
...mercenary standards, Robert Denard's was an illustrious career. The French soldier of fortune waged war throughout three decades in such places as the old Congo, Angola and Benin and had a hand in the overthrow of three governments in the Comoro Islands. But Denard may have finally pushed fortune too far. Involved in the assassination of Comoro President Ahmed Abdallah, Denard and his mercenary minions were running the country until late last week, when French troops called in by the Comoro interim President hastened his departure...