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Leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991 (1931–2022)
Western leaders made verbal assurances in 1990 focused on Germany’s reunification, including James Baker’s line that “NATO’s jurisdiction… would not move one inch eastward,” but no legally binding, wr...
Available sources show Russia has never formally completed a standard NATO accession application as a member state, though Soviet and post‑Soviet leaders at times floated the idea of joining or sought...
Communism as a governing system has seen mixed short- and medium-term outcomes but has repeatedly faced systemic crises and regime collapse in many 20th‑century examples; major factors cited in the li...
Communist regimes in Eastern Europe collapsed in 1989 after a cascade of mass protests, negotiated transfers of power, and political openings that began in Poland and spread across the region; key pro...
Accusations that a public figure is the Antichrist have recurred across two millennia, applied to popes, emperors, revolutionaries, dictators and modern politicians as a way to name ultimate evil in c...
On 4 June 1989 (commonly cited as "6/4"), Chinese troops and armoured units moved into Beijing to clear weeks‑long pro‑democracy protests centred on Tiananmen Square, resulting in a violent crackdown ...
Available reporting shows Jeffrey Sachs has publicly engaged with Russian officials and Russian-hosted forums—he spoke at the UN Security Council at Russia’s invitation in 2023 and has participated in...
As of 2025, most mainstream listings identify five countries that constitutionally remain one‑party, Marxist‑Leninist or socialist states commonly described as “communist”: China, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos ...
Between 1950 and 1991 Soviet living standards and consumer-goods availability shifted from measurable postwar improvements through a long period of stagnation and chronic shortages to a turbulent coll...
Ronald Reagan combined a regimen of military and economic pressure with high‑profile rhetoric and later pragmatic diplomacy; historians credit him with shaping the conditions that hastened the Cold Wa...
The Soviet Union conducted a series of direct military operations, occupations and covert interventions across Eurasia and beyond during the 20th century, ranging from Red Army advances in the civil-w...
Perestroika sought to rescue and modernize Soviet socialism by introducing decentralization, market-like mechanisms and political openness, but by 1991 it had both undermined core socialist institutio...
The collapse of the Soviet Union was not the product of a single actor but of an interaction between Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist policies that destabilized central Communist control and Boris Yeltsi...
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) has a documented and continuing mission presence connected to Russia: mission calls to Russia date to the 1840s, the first recorded baptisms in th...
The Americans treats Mikhail Gorbachev less as a developed onscreen character and more as a historical force whose glasnost and perestroika catalyze late-series plotlines: his reforms create internal ...
The phrase “New World Order” has no single “inventor”; it appears in political debate and conspiracy lore with multiple origins and prominent usages across decades, most notably in Mikhail Gorbachev’s...
Western leaders did make verbal assurances to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO forces or jurisdiction would not move into the territory of the former East Germany — notably James Baker’s “not one i...
Soviet tanks and troops moved into Vilnius in January 1991, seizing the TV tower and other key sites and killing between 13–14 Lithuanian civilians in confrontations with largely unarmed protesters . ...
The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 after a mix of political breakdown at the center—most visibly the failed August coup that fatally weakened Mikhail Gorbachev and empowered Boris Yeltsin—and rising n...
Fifteen independent countries emerged from the Soviet Union when it dissolved in 1991: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajik...