Word: communist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...overthrown, and the Soviet empire has fallen apart. The Russian heartland is ruled by an ultra-nationalist military dictatorship, the Baltic republics by Catholic radicals, and Central Asia by fundamentalist emirates. Tanks patrol the streets of Moscow, and throughout the country a fearful, starving populace wreaks revenge on former Communist Party members, Jews and intellectuals...
...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...
Last week's narrow defeat of a Supreme Soviet motion to debate an end to one-party rule showed just how tenuous the authority of the Soviet Communist Party now is. Striking workers might bring about not only a collapse of power in Moscow but the snapping of links to the outlying republics. A wave of secessionism might then follow, with the probability of murderous ethnic strife in its wake...
...Marshall Goldman, a leading American Sovietologist, last summer. The coup menace is exacerbated by the growing strength of Russian ultra-nationalist organizations. Extremist groups like Pamyat have targeted Jews (a paranoid Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theory), "intellectuals" and "Russophobes" as scapegoats for national decline. The nationalists are at heart anti-Communist, but their appeal overlaps with a growing blue-collar nostalgia for the despotic simplicities of the Stalinist...
...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...