After being artificially cut off from Europe by the dead hand of state socialism, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Latvia, Estonia, and (my ancestral homeland of) Lithuania had regained their rightful place in the world and taken a very large step away from their troubled history of Russian and Soviet domination.
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Naive as he is about finding fish, he writes well about the Russians he meets, from his friend Yuri Brodsky who has spent 25 years cataloguing the history of the first Soviet gulag on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea to Fyodorovich, a trapper, who survived the camps in Siberia and stayed on to live like a hermit in the boundless far eastern taiga.
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And last, but not least, its eclectic mix of Soviet history and European vibe in people and architecture offers a soft introduction to Eastern Europe before you venture north to see Lenin's mausoleum.
Lasha Bakradze, a professor of Soviet history at Tbilisi University, recently presented a new survey commissioned by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which found that 45% of Georgians expressed a positive attitude to Stalin.
BBC: Georgia divided over Stalin 'local hero' status in Gori
Given the Soviet Union's history of mass murder, subversion, and deceit, it is astonishing that even tangential association with Soviet-backed causes in the past does not arouse the moral outrage now that is still so readily evoked by connections with the (undisputedly revolting) regime in South Africa.
All the great figures of Soviet military history, and many of the political figures as well, pass in and out of this story.
The origins of the unrest lie both in the recent turmoil in Kyrgyzstani politics, and in the country's history as a former state of the Soviet Union.
But, said Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, the collapse of the Soviet empire and of other empires in history shows that flexibility of government is a virtue that extends the lives of political and economic systems.
In the history of the mouse, Engelbart was the Soviet Union.
He hoped that inviting Mr Putin to Gdansk with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, would make it impossible for the Russian leader to promote a Soviet-style version of history.
This progresses upwards with increasing complexity to the end of secondary level education - where a study of world history requires an analysis of the role of specified Russian leaders in the break-up of the Soviet Union.
"The common determination on the part of the Soviet Union and the United States to preserve the territorial integrity of such imperial accidents of history as Yugoslavia -- to say nothing of the USSR and Iraq -- under centralized, totalitarian rule is emerging as the ironic definition of the so-called 'New World Order, '" said Frank J.
The most enduring embargo in modern day history is a remnant of a Cold War past when the Soviet Union was the enemy and the world was on the brink of nuclear war.
After decades of Soviet rule and careful manipulation of language and history, they suddenly found themselves independent but without anything much to hold them together.
Jennifer Homans, the author of "Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet, " says it became a showcase for the Soviet regime, and that that legacy endures.
Mr. STEVE COLL (Author, "Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001"): My pleasure, Jacki.
After graduation he later lived in Leningrad for about 10 years, during which time he endured a sobering arrest by Soviet authorities for attending a private lecture on the history of Jews in Spain.
Soviet history is notable considering a recent sale put on by retailer Target of Missoni goods.
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The answer to that riddle lies in the recent history of the Cold War, in which we learned the impact of free information on Soviet citizens behind the Iron Curtain.
In the 1990s, with the Soviet Union vanquished, it was fashionable to talk about the end of history, and the inevitable triumph of Western liberalism, both economic and political.
It is this history of confrontation with America, coupled with a close association with both Cuba and the former Soviet Union, that has, in Washington, caused the prospect of an Ortega victory to ruffle so many feathers.
Documents disclosed by the opening of Soviet archives and though America's freedom of information legislation mean that contemporary history is continually being revised.
As last week's column pointed out, no country can look back on its history without shame, and modern Russia does not need to feel perpetually burdened by the crimes of the Soviet Union.
Research into seabed minerals has a long and slightly conspiratorial history, starting in the Cold War with the United States and the Soviet Union surveying the oceans ahead of possible future conflict.
BBC: UK Seabed Resources joins deep-ocean mineral-mining rush
This campaign started from what was initially seen as a vacuous and pro-forma delineation of rights, but gradually grew and developed into something that had an absolutely enormous effect on Soviet history.
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