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Friday, April 11, 2014

Ukraine and Europe's Communist Memories


Apr 11, 2014 03:00 am | Roland Flamini
Given Vladimir Putin’s deep sense of anger over Russia’s humiliation by the West in the 1990s, can he possibly not be aware that his Crimean land grab and confrontation over Ukraine coincides with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet empire? And if so, what does he have planned for November, the month in 1989 when the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the end of Moscow’s grip on its Eastern and Central European vassal states? That question is making a lot of people across the Kremlin’s old domain, from Hungary to Estonia, very nervous.
Like Putin’s Crimean move, the end to forty years of Soviet control caught almost everyone by surprise—but in reverse, as everyone waited for the other shoe—the Soviet shoe—to drop. “Lurking in everybody’s mind was the historical precedent of the Prague spring,” Richard Barkley, who was U.S. ambassador in East Berlin at the time, recalled in an audio history program recently. “Whether or not finally Moscow would wake up and say ‘Oh my God, it’s out of control,’ and say reform and openness be damned we cannot allow this to get out of control.”
read morehttp://nationalinterest.org/commentary/ukraine-europes-communist-memories-10228

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