Word: union
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Soviet Union has formidable reserves of resiliency, as it showed during the crisis of Hitler's invasion. But what if the dark forebodings of a Soviet screenwriter came true...
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...
...miners not only won all of their basic demands, but set up strike committees that became for a while the headquarters of local political power. Yeltsin himself has called those committees "the embryos of real people's power." If a new wave of strikes rolled across the Soviet Union, the nationwide momentum from below for political change might prove unstoppable...
...total collapse of the Soviet Union might create almost as many global problems as it solved. Regional despotisms like Fidel Castro's 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...
Gorbachev's own vision remains that of a Soviet Union that is sufficiently open to be honest about its problems but sufficiently centralized to remain a powerful Leninist state. The trouble is, how many other Soviet citizens share it? The glasnost he unleashed has turned into a dangerous tiger for 280 million people to ride. If Gorbachev offers no realistic alternative to continued Leninism, he may be forced to try caging it once more -- which he probably will -- or to face the dissolution of the "socialist sixth of the earth...