Word: soviet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sakharov participated in a public demonstration for the first time on Dec. 5, 1966, joining a tiny band of dissidents who had assembled in Moscow's Pushkin Square to call for a new and genuine Soviet constitution. His increasingly open defiance of the government caused his three children by his first wife virtually to disown him. Nonetheless, Sakharov gave them his comfortable Moscow apartment and his dacha when he stripped himself of the luxuries he had acquired as a nuclear physicist. He donated his life savings of $153,000, an astronomical sum by Soviet standards, to cancer research...
Because Sakharov was one of his nation's most distinguished scientists, his devastating critiques of Soviet policies cut deep. In his books, which were published only in the West, he repeatedly pointed to the failure of Soviet society to fulfill the promise of Communist ideology. Sakharov's writings on domestic affairs irked the leadership almost as much as his criticism of Brezhnev's foreign policy, which he characterized as imperialist and expansionist. His mistrust of Kremlin intentions was so strong that he said in 1983 that it might be best for the U.S. to "spend a few billion dollars...
Even with glasnost, Sakharov found numerous causes to pursue. Encouraged by bilateral cuts in Soviet and U.S. arsenals, he pressed for conventional-arms reductions and a demilitarized "corridor" in Europe to lessen the possibility of a surprise attack from either side. He was hardly placated when Moscow admitted that the invasion of Afghanistan had been a mistake; he criticized the government for a colonialist attitude toward Armenia and the Baltic states. Though a supporter of Gorbachev's basic reforms, he used the Congress of People's Deputies as a tribune to attack him for accumulating too much personal power. "There...
Baker's ideas for recasting the structures of U.S.-European cooperation -- dubbed "Bakerstroika" by British pundits -- were a first cut at answering a question implicit in the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the end of the cold war: as the Soviet military threat shrinks, what does Europe need with the U.S.? The decline of Soviet power, the growing vitality of the European Community and the rush to reunify Germany require the U.S. to contemplate European ties based less on fear of Moscow's intentions and more on healthy economic and political competition...
Rezzori was the son of a minor aristocratic family living on the outer fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire near Czernowitz in the Bukovina, which became part of Rumania in 1919 when Rezzori was five, and was later swallowed by the Soviet Union. Rezzori's tale is not a continuous narrative but a group of character studies of five people who presided over his childhood and youth -- pillars of the writer's adult imagination around whose base the boy's life was lived...