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Soviet in sentence

1440 examples of Soviet in a sentence

Beyond oil and gas, Russia’s arms export agency, Rosoboronexport, has just seized Avtovaz, the giant dysfunctional Soviet car factory, and VSMPO-Avisma, Russia’s big titanium company, while all aircraft production has been concentrated in one state company.
The Silver Fox of Dictatorship and DemocracyMOSCOW – Throughout his years in power, Eduard Shevardnadze was known as the “silver fox,” a man who seemed to glide effortlessly from leader of Soviet Georgia and Kremlin Politburo member to Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform-minded foreign minister, before reemerging as post-Soviet Georgia’s pro-Western president, ironically opposing Gorbachev.
By the end of his life, Shevardnadze had become a political pariah in Georgia, the West, and Russia, where he was viewed as an architect of the Soviet Union’s dissolution.
In the 1970s, he would flatter Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev with spectacular displays of fealty to the Kremlin, only to meet with protesting Georgian students in support of their right, in opposition to the Kremlin’s wishes, to speak Georgian, not Russian, as a state language.
Everything at which Georgians excelled under Shevardnadze in the Soviet era – entrepreneurship, education, and culture – was greatly neglected by him in the 1990s.
Surely, Shevardnadze’s political skills were worthy of another great Soviet politician from the Caucasus, the Armenian Anastas Mikoyan, once Stalin’s trusted trade minister and later Nikita Khrushchev’s fellow anti-Stalinist and deputy prime minister.
Likewise, Shevardnadze resigned as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Georgia in the 1980s, ostensibly in protest against Soviet rule, only to be appointed Soviet Foreign Minister by Gorbachev.
Having gained the trust of Western leaders and overseen the dismantling of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, he then resigned in 1990, declaring that Russia – under Gorbachev – was returning to dictatorship.
His death brings closer the end of the Gorbachev generation of reform communists, those who – like Shevardnadze and the late Boris Yeltsin – presented a stark contrast in the late 1980s to the dour Brezhnev-era hard-liners, spurring (mostly inadvertently) the collapse of the Soviet empire and the long transition to democracy.
His generation confronted the scourge of domestic terrorism and witnessed revolution in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the rise of Solidarity in Poland.
In fact, his initiative to counter the Soviet deployment of SS-20 intermediate-range nuclear missiles, a plan he set out in a major speech in 1977, was motivated above all by concerns about a potential decoupling of Europe and its US ally.
From the days of Soviet collectivization in the 1930s down to President Mugabe's racist policies in Zimbabwe today, famines result from civil wars or ideological lunacies.
Shortly before the Soviet Union’s dissolution was complete, I asked Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as National Security Adviser under US President Jimmy Carter, what the world should expect from a post-Soviet Russia.
He replied that the Soviet Union’s dissolution would bring about a new era of global peace, if – and only if – Russia remained within its geographical boundaries.
Indeed, India repeatedly abstained from United Nations resolutions urging the withdrawal of Soviet forces – resolutions that had overwhelming support among the other non-aligned countries.
Then he set himself on fire - a protest and sacrifice that called to mind the protests of Buddhist monks against the Vietnam War a half-century ago, and that of the Czech student Jan Palach against the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring in 1969.
Many are fed up with the arbitrary imposition of trade barriers – affecting goods ranging from chocolate to steel pipes – in their former Soviet markets.
Annual household consumption is now double the level achieved in the Soviet Union’s dying days.
The last generation of Soviet leaders well understood the importance of maintaining living standards, which is why they used revenues from oil and gas exports to import consumer goods.
Elsewhere, notably in many of the Soviet Union’s other successor states and in Latin America, those in power have often simply changed the constitution – including rules on term limits – to their advantage.
They failed – and later claimed victory for the full demise of the Soviet empire.
The differences between the Warsaw Bloc countries and the Soviet republics were important, but one similarity was crucial: in all of these countries, the Kremlin had imposed communism at gunpoint.
The peoples that comprised the USSR had different histories long before Russian domination; and, under the Soviet system’s nationalities policy, their identity as members of distinct political units had actually been consolidated.
In the bad old days, only 7 percent of the Soviet labor force worked in trade, compared with 15-20 percent in the West, because trade was considered “unproductive”.
They did not experience the dull but stable certainties of the Soviet party-state, and few yearn for its resurrection.
As soon as Soviet power in Eastern Europe collapsed in 1989, those countries could switch to the superior Western technologies in computers, telecommunications, transport, pharmaceuticals, and many other areas.
The old Soviet nomenklatura became the new political managers of Russia.
Putin’s narrative may be reminiscent of Soviet propaganda.
Elections in Russia today are no more fair, free, or competitive than in Soviet times.
The US also spent $50 million on a “jihad literacy” project to inspire Afghans to fight the Soviet “infidels” and to portray the CIA-trained guerrillas as “holy warriors.”
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