Tag - soviet

 
 

SOVIET

COMMENTARY / World
Jul 11, 2014
The silver fox of dictatorship and democracy
The reality of the times was that Eduard Shevardnadze was both a democrat and a despot. His death brings closer to the end the Gorbachev generation of reform communists who presented a stark contrast to the dour Brezhnev-era hard-liners, spurring (mostly inadvertently) the collapse of the Soviet empire and the long transition to democracy.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 8, 2014
Shevardnadze's lessons for the West
Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister and Georgian president who died Monday at 86, was not an effective leader, but if Western leaders had paid closer attention to what he said when he was alive, they would have been better prepared for today's crisis in Ukraine.
COMMENTARY / World
May 19, 2014
Europe's economic Iron Curtain
Twenty-five years after the Berlin Wall fell, a just-released set of gloomy economic forecasts demonstrate how the countries formerly under Moscow's sway are still painfully connected to Russia and to one another.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 10, 2014
Contradictions over Ukraine
Western criticisms of Russia's move into Ukraine's Crimea region reek of double standards. Much of what is Ukraine today would not have existed if not for the creation of the Soviet Union.
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 24, 2014
Ukraine's agony may be final Cold War episode
Ukraine's agony is a reverberation of the protracted process of cleaning up after the Soviet Union 'experiment.' So, this is perhaps the final episode of the Cold War.
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 21, 2014
The return of 1980s rhetoric in Russia
Today's Russia may be a wealthier, more open nation than the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, but President Vladimir Putin's propaganda machine is working hard on restoring the stifling moral climate of 30 years ago.
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 17, 2014
Why is Stalin honored despite killing millions?
It is impossible to imagine a Hitler statue anywhere in Germany, so why is it that statues of Josef Stalin have been restored in towns across Georgia (his birthplace) and that another is to be erected in Moscow as part of a commemoration of all Soviet leaders?
JAPAN
Dec 16, 2013
Redress was sought for '83 KAL jet downing
Japan drew up a claim in 1986 for just over ¥3.4 billion in damages from the Soviet Union for the 28 Japanese killed in the 1983 shoot-down of Korean Air Flight 007 over Soviet airspace, recently disclosed Foreign Ministry documents reveal.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 23, 2013
'Seeking for Utopia'
From the October Revolution of 1917 through the 1930s, the promise of Utopia within the USSR was an important ideology in the development of the nation. As such a central theme to society, it naturally also became a focus of Russian art.
JAPAN
Aug 1, 2013
Large numbers of communist spies active in Japan, U.K. said in 1983
British officials believed in the early 1980s that Japanese institutions had been "slightly" penetrated by communist intelligence services, according to documents declassified Thursday at the National Archives in London.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 5, 2013
Putin unable to control infighting among elite
The regime established since 2000 by Russian President Vladimir Putin is likely to fall apart — perhaps this year — for the same reason that the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Longform

Later this month, author Shogo Imamura will open Honmaru, a bookstore that allows other businesses to rent its shelves. It's part of a wave of ideas Japanese booksellers are trying to compete with online spaces.
The story isn't over for Japan's bookstores