Part 32 (1/2)

In 1964, Premier Nikita Khrushchev was forced from office after his efforts to reform the nation's moribund economic system failed. Leonid Brezhnev, an old-school, hard-line Communist, replaced Khrushchev. Brezhnev wasted no time slapping down attempts to liberalize Communist regimes in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1981.

The country continued its full-court press in the contest with the United States for supremacy in s.p.a.ce; in 1971 the Soviets launched Solyut I, the first in a series of permanently manned s.p.a.ce stations. The USSR also continued to encourage the spread of communism in other countries and continued to economically prop up those countries that already had it.

All that, plus trying to keep up in the arms race and fight a war in Afghanistan, put a heavy strain on the Soviet economy. In addition, Soviet leaders just wouldn't stop dying. In 1982, Brezhnev expired and was replaced by sixty-eight-year-old Yuri Andropov, who died in 1984. He was replaced by seventy-two-year-old Konstantin Chernenko, who died in 1985. Chernenko's replacement was fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev, who pledged to revitalize the economy, modernize Soviet communism, and improve relations with the West.

In 1988, Gorbachev introduced major economic and political reforms, dubbed ”perestroika” (restructuring) and ”glasnost” (openness). He also urged other Warsaw Pact nations to follow the USSR's lead. They did so with enthusiasm. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, as did Communist governments in country after country. This included the Soviet Union itself in 1991, but only after Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Republic, thwarted a Communist coup attempt in that state.

The USSR was dissolved into a collection of autonomous states that enjoyed varying degrees of success on their own. The Russian Republic remained a considerable world presence; due in large part to its wealth of natural resources, including oil. In 1999, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB official, succeeded Yeltsin as Russian leader, and Russian relations with the West took a decidedly frostier turn.

Putin agreed to step down as president in 2008-after hand-picking his successor, Dmitry Medvedev-but made it clear he intended to continue to be the dominant figure in Russian government, even without the t.i.tle.

China:

Off to a Slow Start, but Picking Up Steam

The world's largest nation had ended the 1950s with one of the world's most ironically named failures, the Great Leap Forward. So, in 1966, Mao Zedong tried launching another big-name program, the Cultural Revolution.

Enforced by a newly formed paramilitary organization called the Red Guard, Mao wanted to root out all deviation from Communist ideals. Led by Mao's wife, Chiang Chi'ing, the Red Guard hunted down ”counterrevolutionaries,” who were punished with penalties that ranged from being forced to wear a dunce cap in public to being executed. By the time of Mao's death in 1976, the fanatical movement, in which as many as five hundred thousand people were killed, threatened to crumble Chinese society.

Chiang tried to rule in her husband's place with a quartet of henchmen known as the Gang of Four, but most Chinese officials had had enough of her and the Cultural Revolution, and she and the gang were thrown out.

Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping, began a serious reform of China's economy, mostly by loosening up overbearing governmental controls and taking advantage of the country's huge size. It worked. Between 1978 and 1998, the gross national product grew at an average annual rate of 10 percent. Exports soared a staggering 2,000 percent during the same period. It didn't hurt things that China regained control of the economic dynamo of Hong Kong from the British in 1997.

Political reform, however, lagged. Efforts to democratize were vigorously thwarted and dissent stifled, most notably demonstrated by the crus.h.i.+ng of a student demonstration in 1989 at Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

Still, as the twenty-first century began, China was poised to become more of a world force than it had been in centuries, and had emerged as America's chief rival for the preeminent position in the world economy.

Elsewhere in Asia:

Changing Times

Other Asian countries steered similar courses to China's, without the Cultural Revolution part. In the Philippines, a lawyer named Ferdinand Marcos was elected president in 1965, was reelected in 1969, declared martial law in 1972, and stayed in office until he was ousted in 1986.

One of the reasons Marcos gave for seizing power was the fear of a Communist takeover. It wasn't a wholly unwarranted fear. After North Vietnamese Communists took South Vietnam in 1975, Laos and Cambodia followed.

In Cambodia, the ruling Khmer Rouge party, under Communist dictator Pol Pot, undertook one of the century's most horrific regimes. More than 1.5 million people-as much as 20 percent of the country's entire population-were worked to death, starved to death, or executed for offenses as mystifyingly petty as wearing eyegla.s.ses.

The Khmer Rouge was toppled in 1979 by invading Vietnamese troops, who withdrew in 1989. Although Vietnam remained as one of the world's few Communist nations in 2007, democratic governments were restored in Laos in 1989 and in Cambodia in 1991.

While much of the rest of Asia was quarreling with neighbors or fighting internally, j.a.pan was continuing its amazing postwar economic recovery. Through the 1960s, its economy grew at an average annual clip of 11 percent. In the 1970s, j.a.pan responded to the global oil crisis by s.h.i.+fting its focus from heavy industry to high-tech electronics. This consolidated its position as an economic heavyweight.

But it also became a victim of its own successes. Rapid growth and continual innovation raised expectations of financial markets to unreasonable levels. Other Asian states-most notably Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan-emulated j.a.pan's methods and provided stiff compet.i.tion. By the end of the twentieth century, j.a.pan's remarkable economic run had ended.

LORDS OF THE RINGS.

In 1964, j.a.pan hosted the Summer Olympics, marking its full reemergence onto the world scene after World War II. The hosts didn't do badly in the games, either: j.a.pan won sixteen gold medals, behind only the USSR and the United States.

In South Asia, the world's largest democracy, India, struggled through the 1960s like a gawky adolescent trying to figure out how to harness his developing strength. It found itself frequently at odds with its neighbors-China in the early 1960s, Pakistan almost continually-and dealing internally with sectarian and religious strife among the Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh elements of its population.

As a leader of the world's nonaligned nations, India became a nuclear power in the 1970s and played both sides of the cold war against each other, siding often with the Soviet Union and occasionally with the West. Beginning in the 1980s, India also undertook a series of ambitious economic reforms. By the first decade of the new century, its economy was one of the fastest growing in the world.

The Middle East:

s.h.i.+fting Sands

If you had to pick just one word to describe the Middle East from the 1960s on, unstable unstable would be a good one. At least four complex and deep-rooted conflicts intertwined into a Gordian knot of, well, instability: would be a good one. At least four complex and deep-rooted conflicts intertwined into a Gordian knot of, well, instability: -fundamentalist Islamic antipathy toward the West;-sectarian feuds between s.h.i.+te and Sunni Muslims;-differences between Islamic countries with more secular governments and those with religious bases; and-the Arab world's ever so mild (he said, sarcastically) dislike of Israel.

The very existence of Israel, in fact, was enough to send many Arab leaders scurrying for their helmets in the 1960s. In 1967, fearing an attack was imminent, Israel launched a preemptive strike on Egypt and quickly routed Arab forces, which were indeed planning an attack. The so-called Six-Day War ended with Israel seizing Arab territories that included the Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the city of Jerusalem. It also ended with a three-year-old group called the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) taking the lead in seeking the destruction of Israel.

In 1973, Egypt and Syria struck first and pushed into Israeli territory before an Israeli counterattack drove them back. Under pressure from both the United States and Soviet Union, the Arab nations gave up the fight. (But the Arab-dominated Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) retaliated by cutting oil supplies. Prices around the world tripled, effectively ending the globe's postWorld War II economic surge.) Weary of the violent approach, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat decided to seek peace with the Israelis. In 1978, at the U.S. presidential retreat at Camp David, in Maryland, Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin signed a peace treaty brokered by President Jimmy Carter.

Peace didn't catch on. In 1981, Sadat was a.s.sa.s.sinated for his efforts, and Israel invaded Lebanon in an effort to root out PLO terrorists who were using the country as their base. Israeli troops stayed four years. In 1993, however, Israeli and PLO leaders met secretly in Oslo, Norway, and came up with a tentative plan for semi-autonomy for Palestinians in some of the territory Israel had seized in 1967. Like Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who oversaw the Oslo peace effort, was a.s.sa.s.sinated.

ONE WACKY IRAQI.

According to U.S. journalist Mark Bowden, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had the chefs at each of his twenty-plus palaces prepare three elaborate meals each day, whether he was there or not, to lessen the chances of his being poisoned.