Kabul holds many glimpses of its Soviet past hidden in plain sight around its jumbled hillsides — sobering artifacts that now confront the United States and its allies as they begin pondering what their own legacy might be.
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Kabul’s Soviet Ruins Offer a Reminder of Imperial Ambitions
Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, one thing is increasingly clear: Boy, do the Republicans miss communism. For Republicans, being anti-communist didn’t merely mean opposition to the Soviets and their ideology. That kind of anti-communism was all but universal in the United States, from the Republican right to the small, democratic socialist left (and encompassing European socialists as well). For the 45 years after World War II, however, anti-communism was also the Republicans’ ultimate wedge issue in U.S. politics. Read full article > >
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The GOP scrambles for a bogeyman
It’s a sign of these unsettled times that the analyst who famously announced “the end of history” in 1989 , when the Soviet empire was crumbling and liberal, free-market democracy seemed inevitable, has published a new essay with the provocative title “The Future of History.” Francis Fukuyama’s article in the January edition of Foreign Affairs offers a good introduction to what may be the biggest political issue of 2012 — the decline of the middle class in the United States and around the world. Without this middle class, Fukuyama argues, liberal democracy loses its anchor. Read full article > >
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The danger in a declining middle class
There were Russians who cried in spite of themselves when the hammer-and-sickle flag of the Soviet Union was lowered for the last time on Dec. 25, 1991. Yelena Ilingina was one. It had to happen, she realized that, but still, this was her country. Ilingina got together with friends. There was much vodka and laughter, and someone had a guitar. “We sang all the old songs,” she remembers. “And of course, we cried.” Read full article > >
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The end of the Soviet road
Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev says the Russian election was marred by fraud and calls for a re-run as protesters plan new rallies.
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Gorbachev calls for new election
Kyrgyzstan swears in new President Almazbek Atambayev in the former Soviet nation’s first peaceful transfer of power.
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New Kyrgyz leader vows stability
Lana Peters, the only daughter of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, dies of colon cancer at a care home in the US state of Wisconsin, aged 85.
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Stalin’s only daughter dies in US
This is not the first time that the internationally renowned ballerina Nina Ananiashvili has found herself in a tricky position. And as usual, her extraordinary artistry is part of the solution. The former Bolshoi Star, a long-limbed firecracker with glamorous eyes, has danced her way out of corners before. Back in the late 1980s, after another dancer’s defection led the paranoid bureaucracy of the Bolshoi Ballet to seize Ananiashvili’s passport and refuse to let her travel, the young ballerina with a spine of steel delivered an ultimatum: My freedom or my resignation. And with that, she leveraged her sparkling technique and matchless charisma into a personal, artistic and professional coup, securing official permission to perform with companies outside the Soviet bloc. Read full article > >
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Nina Ananiashvili: Dancing to serve her country
NIZHNY TAGIL, Russia — In far-off Moscow, the authorities are fond of suggesting that only a spoiled elite in the capital carp about eroding freedoms, controlled elections and a gloom they compare to the later days of the Soviet Union. “There are people who think that the atmosphere in the country is suffocating,” Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, told television interviewers last week, “while others want three percentage points off their taxes to get their farm going.” Read full article > >
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Russian political life far from Putin and Kremlin
MOSCOW — In a tiny hut in the woods where he survives without fixed address or running water, Abdul Malik keeps a neatly pressed suit hanging on the wall above his thin mattress, an emblem of the respectable life that should have been his, destroyed by the aftershocks of the Soviet planned economy. Malik, a 22-year-old from Tajikistan, was only 2 when the Soviet Union disintegrated under its own unsupportable weight in 1991, leaving outposts of the far-flung empire stranded economically, many in the future generations doomed to destitution. Read full article > >
MOSCOW — Twenty years ago Friday, communist hard-liners staged a coup here , sending tanks rumbling to the Russian White House in an effort to preserve the Soviet Union. Instead they touched off a powerful expression of democracy. Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically elected president in Russia’s thousand years, galvanized the resistance when he climbed atop one of the tanks and called on citizens to defend the freedoms he had promised to deliver. They mounted the barricades, unarmed, willing to risk their lives for democracy. The coup leaders lost their nerve. A few months later, the Soviet Union was dead . Read full article > >
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Russia, once almost a democracy
On June 12, 1991, Russians made Boris Yeltsin the first freely elected president in the history of their country. It was a seminal moment in the deconstruction of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin ran against Communists, and against communism, and won a hearty endorsement from the Russian people. He should have been a nobody by then. Once a member of the top echelon of the Communist Party, he had been booted out of the Politburo in 1988 for being a little too insistent on supporting the reform program of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev — more insistent, even, than Gorbachev. The Soviet system was not one that allowed comebacks. When Yeltsin was expelled, everyone knew that this was supposed to be the end of him. Read full article > >
The year 2011 marks the 20th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Here’s a look back on the chaos that surrounded the USSR’s final months. Read full article > >
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Final Days of the Soviet Union
A Lithuanian court jails a former Soviet commando for the killing of seven border guards just after independence in 1991.
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Lithuania jails Soviet commando
