When Joseph Stalin died the world knew that an era had ended. And because it was the end of a long winter, though not necessarily the coming of spring, the change which ensued in the relations between nations was sometimes called the thaw. For a while the only visible manifestation of the thaw was a general fading, ungluing, cracking of power positions on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In the Soviet empire the melting process has produced popular uprising and high-level confusion as to how the empire should be managed (see below). In the free world it has...
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