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Scooped by
Kent College History
onto A-level: Crisis of Communism, 1953-2000 February 27, 2022 12:09 PM
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Kent College History's curator insight,
October 21, 2018 4:04 AM
'On 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to venture into space. History In An Hour offers a summary of Yuri Gagarin's epic life.' |
Kent College History's curator insight,
June 25, 2016 11:20 AM
The beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. Leonid Brezhnev's Funeral on 15 November 1982, reported by Alistair Burnett.
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'Few people remember Brezhnev kindly. At best, he is a pathetic figure with bushy eyebrows stumbling across the international scene, jovial but almost incoherent under the weight of tranquillisers, vodka and oncoming dementia. At worst, he is the man who unleashed the Warsaw Pact armies to overthrow the Prague Spring in 1968, who destabilised half the world by sending Russian forces into Afghanistan in 1979, who devised the Brezhnev Doctrine licensing communist states to use armed force against any nation threatening to leave the ‘socialist camp’. Susanne Schattenberg sets out to correct and sometimes reverse these impressions. ‘I expected to be working on a Stalinist, a hardliner, an architect of domestic and foreign policies of repression,’ she writes in the introduction to this book. But ‘instead of a Cold Warrior, I was faced with a man who passionately fought for peace and ruined his health in the process. Instead of a dogmatic ideologue, a heart-throb who loved fast cars and liked to crack jokes.’ A heart-throb? She adds, disarmingly: ‘I will not escape accusations of being something of a Brezhnev apologist.’'