An elusive new world order, 1991-2020 - Integration and fragmentation in wider Europe - Soviet demise, Russian reprise
15 important questions on An elusive new world order, 1991-2020 - Integration and fragmentation in wider Europe - Soviet demise, Russian reprise
What reform was Kremlin serious about?
- The emancipation of the Easter Bloc countries, together with the withdrawal of Soviet troops with Afghanistan, confirmed that the new leadership in the Kremlin was serious about domestic reform.
- Forging better relations with the West and focusing resources on domestic priorities were designed to reinvigorate the Marxist promise of a better quality of life for all.
What inspired drives for independence?
- In the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, popular calls for the restoration of sovereignty and the expulsion of Russian nationals, fueled by memories of the aggressive 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact, inspired similar drives for independence across the empire.
- Nationalism was poised to triumph over the Leninist ideal of Soviet Socialist republics.
What happened to Gorbachev?
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Who is Boris Yeltsin? What did he stand for?
How did it end up with Gorbachev and Yeltsin?
- Gorbachev returned to Moscow, but his power and his credibility of the Soviet Communist Party were irrevocably compromised.
- Yeltsin became an instant hero and the locus of real leadership, and when Ukrainians voted for independence in the fall of 1991, the Russian leader declined to intervene.
What happened to the Warsaw Pact?
- The four former Soviet republics that possessed ICBMs agreed to transfer these weapons to Russia, and the US provided financial assistance for the dismantling process. The threat of a superpower nuclear exchange that everyone understood would leave the earth uninhabitable was suddenly and thankfully reduced.
- The Warsaw Pact was dissolved, and the former Eastern Bloc countries, keen to improve living conditions after four decades of subservience to the Soviet command economy, vied for membership in the dynamic and prosperous European Union (EU).
What is Yeltsin accused of by critics?
What change of thought happened in Russia?
- By the time that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a Yeltsin protégé and career KGB officer, was elected president in March 2000, many Russians had lost their confidence in the government's ability to improve their lives through market-based reforms.
- Across the country there was a growing mood of nostalgia for the securities of the old Soviet system, with its guaranteed employment and provision of basic goods and services.
What was condemned by the international community about Russia?
- The Russian-speaking majority of Crimea then voted to accept annexation by Russia, an action that was widely condemned by the international community.
- The US and EU countries also imposed punishing economic sanctions and expelled Russia from the G8 group of leading world economies.
Which regime did Putin support?
- Putin embraced the vicious regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, inserting Russian military forces into that country's protracted civil war in 2015.
- Insisting the intervention was part of a larger fight against international terrorism, Putin's gambit in Syria succeeded in reestablishing Russia's role as a major player in the Middle East.
How did people think about the democratic future for Russia?
- By 2020 the optimism of the early 1990s, especially hopes surrounding a new democratic future for Russia, had all but evaporated.
- When the US withdrew from a 30-year-old intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty, asserting that Russia was no longer in compliance with the Reagan-Gorbachev era pact, the door was opened to a possible renewal of the arms race.
What drove Putin's domestic and foreign policy?
- Putin's domestic policies and foreign interventions were driven by a master narrative that cast the fall of the USSR as a singular disaster for everyday Russians.
- The story alleged that post-Soviet society had been infected by Western capitalist values during the 1990s, values that privileged corrupt monied interests who plundered the nation's resources, leading to widespread social and economic breakdown for the vast majority of citizens.
What did the Western democracies do about Putin's values?
What did Putin's system lead to?
- Thanks to the steady, albeit authoritarian, hand of President Putin, Western liberal democracy was exposed as a giant, exploitative fraud.
- The restored system of centralized rule, with orders dictated from above and robust security services capable of silencing liberal dissent at home, had rescued the Russian economy, improved average life expectancy, and reestablished the country's proper influence in the international community.
What was Putin's political style?
- With a number of his political opponents killed either at home or in exile, and with powerful allies supporting the idea of lifetime leadership, Putin had become the model statesman to aspirant autocrats and their supporters worldwide, unflinching in his commitment to restored national greatness under the antidemocratic banner of rule for the people instead of by the people.
- Putin asserts that the post-World War II liberal idea had outlived its purpose and was now opposed by the majority of citizens in the West.
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