I was listening to an XM Satellite BBC program yesterday driving back in the rain. A Russian born man was talking about how during the 1950s Kruschev
Nikita Khrushchev - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikita_Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (April 15 [O.S. April 3] 1894 – September 11, 1971) led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First ...
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came into power in Russia and I remember he came and visited the U.S. and went to Disneyland with Walt Disney under Secret Service Protection and banged his shoe at the United Nations to get attention of the world.
What I didn't know about Khrushchev was that he was a very liberating force and brought the western music like Elvis and Hootenannies and beatnik kinds of ideas into Russia. However, then Breshnev
What I didn't know about Khrushchev was that he was a very liberating force and brought the western music like Elvis and Hootenannies and beatnik kinds of ideas into Russia. However, then Breshnev
Leonid Brezhnev - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev
(Russian: Леони́д Ильи́ч Бре́жнев, IPA: [lʲɪɐˈnʲid ɪlʲˈjitɕ ˈbrʲeʐnʲɪf]
( listen); Ukrainian: Леоні́д Іллі́ч Бре́жнєв, 19 December
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came into power and ended Khruschev's reforms and the Brezhnev era came to become known as the "Stagnation" by Russians. And the man being interviewed who played more modern Russian music had to leave Russia to visit a relative not to be persecuted.
But, most of us here in the U.S. didn't know anything about stuff like this and the Soviet Union was mostly "The Great Satan" to us or "The Evil Empire" that we had to somehow get rid of or die trying.
However, what I didn't know about Khruschev was that he put down Stalin at home and revealed how many millions of Russians Stalin had killed in his purges and how 20 million Russians had died during World War II and how this loss led to the Iron Curtain Directly and splitting apart Germany and Eastern Europe from the free world.
However, As Americans all most of us knew about was that Communists and Khrushkhev were evil sort of like Satan. We all Knew then we would all die in a puff of smoke from an inevitable nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The Cold War was much scarier in it's own way than World War II because we all knew that this time literally all civilization would be gone from this eventually inevitable war through nuclear Hydrogen bombs worldwide which would kill us all and completely destroy the planet and maybe make it blow up like the planet that became the asteroid belt here in the solar system.(A Russian Probe proved the planet blew up from nuclear weapons in the 1970s). This is one of the reasons the
of Russia caused the Soviet Union to collapse to avoid the same thing happening here on Earth through the Soviet Union and the United States.
Intelligentsia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The intelligentsia,
from Latin: intellegentia is a social class of people engaged in
complex mental labour aimed at disseminating culture. This therefore
might ...
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So, watching the closing ceremonies of countries being together and playing each other's national anthems and competing in Russia in the Olympics I realized we had dodged the bullet this time in relation to the horrors I knew every day growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. (I was 21 in 1969). The Cold War ended around 1990 or thereabouts.
Even though Putin has called up 150,000 soldiers and tanks to have war games on the border of the Ukraine I am hopeful that this is more about not wanting this kind of thing to happen in Russia than anything else. Hopefully, they won't drive their tanks into Kiev and end the free government beginning there like during the Cold War.
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