Chernobyl, April 1986, means wormwod in Slavic languages, the Byelorussian Foreign Minister Pyotr Kravchanka told the UN,
October 1990, of the book of revelations reference to the great star called wormwood falling from the sky and people dying from poisoned waters. In 1839 the French Marquis de Custine wrote, 'In Russia, secrecy presides over everything administrative, political and social'.Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader in 1985, the reform programme he announced , called
perestroika, or rebuilding, and the new foreign policy which accompanied it heralded great changes inside the Soviet Union and throughout the world. Sweden provided the official scientific report on the
massive land contamination of Byelorussia and the Ukraine, officially no one in Moscow in 1989 and 1990 knw anything about bequerels or of the massive contamination of food. The total official Soviet recorded death toll directly due to the Chernobyl Nuclear Accident remains at 52. This does not include the death toll of those 30,000 who were evacuated. Should mankind re-evaluate the direct effects of radiation or should mankind refute these Soviet statistics?Perestroika clamped down on the excessive consumption of alcohol, directly leading to an extreme shortage of sugar for samogon distillers or home brewed alcohol. Extreme shortages of meat, even floor, followed as collective farms tended their own allotments first in order to profit from selling their own produce to the cities. Incidents of crime soared. Religion returned Russian Orthodox monasteries and convents were re-opened. Church bells saved after the Russian revolution were carefully re-instated. Stalin's terror was re-lived, Yevtuschenko's film exposed the evil of Stalinism, 'If the truth is replaced by silence, then silence is a lie'. Andrei Sakharov, the human rights campaigner Solzhenitsyin and Pasternak were rehabilitated. In 1987 the last single candidate Duma elections heralded the end of the 70 years of the stereotyped Marxist-Leninist doctrine and the entire population of the Soviet Union was awakened from lethargy.The occupied territories of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bessarabia and Moldova exposed the Molotov-Ribbentrop (Hitler/Stalin) 19th August1939 pact to annex these independent countries, revealed by Dmitri Volkogonov in 1993.Refugees from the Armenian populated enclave of Nagorno Karabakh in the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan fled to Moscow signalling civil war in the Trans-Caucasus. In Georgia, South Ossetians and Abkhazians demanded to remain in the Soviet Union, leading to civil strife.Chechnya and the Beslan massacre ensued. In summary, 1990 brought the two Slavic speaking world leaders Pope John Paul II and Mikhail Gorbachev closer to agreement on the new open world order. The 1990 East West Summit in Malta brought the public admission by Gorbachev that the arms race must end as it revealed the Soviet Union had an economy the size of Belgium. In the present time Putin's Russian Federation tested an ICBM capable of striking Washington. The US claims it wants to base defence missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic to counter threats from Islamic militants. Putin demands a missile shield placed at the Turkish border.The G8 summit in Germany this week includes the Russian Federation with $50 billion reserves due to its massive natural resources, communism to capitalism.