May 13 – 1981: A Turkish right-winger tries to assassinate John Paul II. Evidence points towards Soviet, Bulgarian, & East German involvement. Brezhnev feared the formidable Pope, particularly his support for Solidarność in Poland. #OTD
“With the assistance of Kremlin supervisors, RO attacked nationalists who were abandoning the skinhead subculture for Navalny’s anti-Putin coalition. In return, RO was granted privileged access to public space and the media. ”
There is so much mythmaking about US policy in '80s-'90s that it is hard to conceive a deliberate policy against, e.g., relegalization of Solidarity in Poland or Baltic independence (as well as against other democratic movements further east). But it's in the record. 2/2
At Rapallo in 1922, the German FM& AEG electrical magnate Walter Rathenau made the first treaty with the Soviet Union, enabling Russo-German trade to boom. Though Rathenau was assassinated by anti-Semitic terrorists, Hitler emulated him by striking a deal with Stalin, the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact
Stalin allied himself with Nazi Germany in a joint effort to destroy the states of East Central Europe. The Soviet Union fought the Nazis after Hitler's betrayal forced it to, not out of an anti-Fascist conviction.
〜democratic transition in the early1990s may be,to a large extent, described as a revolt of lower ranks of theSoviet nomenklatura against its older top ranks.4/ Rather than transitioning from one system to another, it was a resolution of an intra-system crisis that eventually&logically(