They recoiled at the Soviet bloc s disintegration.

Measured by Soviet standards, Russia has weakened.

But there were also deeper causes for the Soviet demise.

A citizen of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republic. RADlO MOSCOW

But for Tereshkova and other women of her generation, the great Soviet state and the daring achievements of Soviet science were inseparable.

CAMBRIDGE Soviet ideology was always about the future.

We have hated this but, this coordinating conjunction, ever since the dawn of the Soviet era.

Prosperity became the main weapon that ensured the West s victory over Soviet communism.

This stage of Soviet communism took 40 years to run its course.

The committee requested it from the Soviet government.

Mr. Mikhail Gorbachev, former President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

Just as KGB officers depicted themselves as the Soviet state s ultimate protectors, so Putin believes that he alone is capable of effectively countering threats to Russia.

After all, Putin knows well the old Soviet playbook the fate of previous KGB functionaries may await him.

By the end of the decade, many Soviet bloc regimes had collapsed.

Soviet resources, in terms both of infrastructure and ideology, are exhausted.

Today, Russians listen to old Soviet songs and watch Soviet era movies.

J. Statement by Mr. Mikhail Gorbachev, former President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

Her espousal of free markets indeed, her ringing declarations about the link between political and economic freedom inspired the Soviet bloc s peoples, who had suffered under the Soviet yoke for 40 years.

The vast Soviet empire exited the historical stage without a single shot being fired.

NATO was created in 1949 as an alliance to contain Soviet power.

The Cold War ended quietly, and the dismantlement of the Soviet empire followed.

The final troop withdrawal started on May 15, 1988, and ended on February 15, 1989.

On 30 March, the Soviet 3rd Ukrainian Front crossed from Hungary into Austria.

In 1989, liberal democracy triumphed over the socialist ideology incarnated and promoted by the Soviet Bloc.

In the Soviet zone of occupation, progress was slow and above all coupled with a new enslavement.

The former Soviet republics in Central Asia have all developed various sultanistic forms of government.

But most people of the former Soviet bloc don t see it that way.

But Khrushchev never envisioned the breakup of the Soviet empire as part of his thaw.

Nor should we forget the Stalinist crimes against the peoples of the former Soviet Empire.

In the 1980 s, Mikhail Gorbachev warned that Soviet oil resources were exhausted.

In a violent and massive campaign of collectivization, he brought Soviet agriculture under state control.

And, most significant, during the collapse of the Soviet Union, the vast nuclear arsenal remained intact.

This cleared a path to the peaceful dismantling of communist dictatorship throughout the entire Soviet bloc.

Treaty of Moscow (1920) Soviet Russia recognizes independence of the Democratic Republic of Georgia only to invade the country six months later.

October 27 A Soviet submarine, the U137, runs aground not far from the Swedish naval base at Karlskrona.

And yet the US did not preemptively attack Soviet missile sites, which were relatively vulnerable, because the risk that even one or two of the Soviet missiles would be fired at an American city was enough to deter a first strike.

The latter approach held that efforts to roll back Communism in the short run were too risky, given the Soviet nuclear arsenal, and that the United States and the West should content themselves with limiting the spread of Soviet power and influence.

After independence in the early 1960 s, during the Cold War, they played the West against the Soviet bloc for the same purpose.

All of this discredited the negative views promulgated by the Soviet media.

Naturally, the key role in this model is given to the supply of energy to the post Soviet countries.

Indeed, these countries do not make up some post Soviet space to which Putin often refers.

Thirty years ago, the Afghan mujahedin were mistaken for friends of the West when they fought their country s Soviet invaders.

So is democracy in Moldova, a former Soviet republic that is now Europe s poorest country.

Overt military imperialism of the Soviet sort has, at least historically, rarely been the Chinese way.

Stalin s body was removed from Red Square, Stalin monuments were destroyed, and cities restored their original Soviet names.