By December 1991, the Soviet empire was no more.

Reagan characterized the Soviet Union as an evil empire and increased defense spending to challenge Soviet aggression and capabilities.

The fall of the Soviet empire, naturally, reduced Americans' security interest in Europe.

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

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

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

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

The Soviet Union and its empire quietly disappeared, and with them the Cold War international order.

Nor can the Putin regime s manipulation of popular xenophobia against citizens of the former Soviet empire, such as Georgians.

The grand expansion of the Soviet empire enabled humankind s exploration of the cosmos and its potential expansion beyond Earth.

Nearly two decades after the demise of the Soviet empire, what stands out is a prevailing sense of lost opportunities.

Instead of confronting a (usually hostile) Russian Soviet empire on its border, a vast swath of buffer states appeared after 1991.

Estonia's return to independence became possible as the Soviet Union faced internal regime challenges, loosening its hold on the outer empire.

The failed revolutions in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 foreshadowed the eventual failure of the Soviet empire in 1989.

The inheritors of the Soviet empire never anticipated that their future was to become the West s junior, poorer, repentant, and admiring partner.

I believe that the attempt by President Putin s Kremlin to impose liberal empire or sovereign democracy on the post Soviet states will fail.

Russia is now going through a period of nationalistic reaction to what it regards as the humiliation it suffered after the Soviet empire collapsed.

So far as they are concerned, the countries that were once part of the Russian empire in the Soviet Union should enjoy only limited sovereignty.

The future belonged to the US and the Soviet Union, neither of which had sentimental feelings about the British Empire, let alone the Anglo Saxons.

There was a shift in power from Western Europe and the British Empire to the two new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.

Russia would be furious, because it fears that Kosovo s secession whether or not it is internationally recognized might fuel separatist movements in the former Soviet empire.

The Soviet Union s sudden collapse was a strategic boon to Asia, eliminating a menacing empire and opening the way for China rapidly to pursue its interests globally.

The Soviet Union may have been doomed, but the world has Gorbachev to thank for the fact that the empire he oversaw ended without a bloody conflagration.

In the 1990 s, the fall of the Soviet empire and the brutal implosion of Yugoslavia led to a spectacular increase in the number of independent states.

NEW YORK Twenty years ago, when the Berlin Wall was breached and the Soviet empire was collapsing, only die hard believers in a communist utopia felt unhappy.

But, given the profound uncertainty of a world in flux, as well as the dangers of miscalculation as the Soviet empire collapsed, prudent management trumped grand visions.

The Soviet leadership believed that the old empire had ideal security and territorial possessions, and wanted the newly christened city of Leningrad to enjoy a similar security.

Because the region was part of both the Soviet Union and the Russian empire, President Vladimir Putin s Kremlin regards it as part of Russia s natural sphere of influence.

They had underestimated the strength of German national feeling in the East. And they grossly overestimated the Soviet Union s ability and will to keep its empire at all costs.

As it turned out, after 40 years of containment, the Soviet Union and its empire unraveled, though this outcome was a byproduct of US policy, not its principal purpose.

After the collapse of the Austro Hungarian empire in late 1918, the Red Army of the Hungarian communist state (Hungarian Soviet Republic) conducted successful campaigns to protect the country's borders.

All these developments subtly indicate a deep trend that can be formalized in one sentence America s unipolar moment, which began in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Empire, is over.

He also believed that Soviet control over an empire in Eastern Europe was costing too much and providing too little benefit, and that the invasion of Afghanistan had been a costly disaster.

The West thought it had moved on after the fall of the Soviet empire, but the region and increasingly the global community continues to pay a heavy price for this unholy project.

The break up of the Soviet Union and its satellite empire shows that the way to address such a legacy is not to force unhappy peoples to live together in one country.

Although the rise 25 years ago of Solidarity, the first independent civic movement in the former Soviet empire, had huge political consequences, Solidarity was, primarily, neither a political movement nor a labor union.

As the Soviet empire disintegrated, Germany s leaders recognized that German reunification was possible only in the context of a more united Europe, and they were prepared to make considerable sacrifices to achieve it.

After the collapse in 1945 of the Japanese empire, which had ruled quite brutally over the whole of Korea since 1910, the Soviet Red Army occupied the north, and the US occupied the south.

With high prices for crude oil and natural gas bloating its coffers, Russia is once again aggressively confronting the small and still relatively weak states that fled the eroding Soviet empire 15 years ago.

Indeed, with words like these, Kolakowski, with Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and other kindred souls, ultimately did as much as the trillions of dollars spent on weapons to speed the demise of the totalitarian Soviet empire.

This is the Silk Road connecting the Chinese Empire and the Roman Empire.

The night of November 9, 1989, marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union and its empire, and thus also of the bipolar world that had, for five decades, divided Germany and Europe.

Between 1922 and 1991, the history of Russia is essentially the history of the Soviet Union, effectively an ideologically based state which was roughly conterminous with the Russian Empire before the Treaty of Brest Litovsk.

Avatar and Empire

Embracing the Empire