The collapse of the Soviet Union deprived Russia of key ports and cut the size of its fleet.
Two decades ago the breakup of the Soviet Union left Russia's defense industry on the verge of collapse.
Russia now has 87 billionaires, more than any nation except the U.S. Sixteen years after the Soviet collapse, Russia has handily overtaken Germany, which held the number two spot for six years but hasn't produced many new billion-dollar fortunes of late.
In the very early days after the Soviet collapse, Russia and some of its neighbours swarmed with Western advisers, disseminating not only the basics of market economics but also the mechanics of multi-party democracy.
As the foreign-ministry document asserts, Russia needs to consolidate the former Soviet space by, for example, pushing the customs union between Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
The vast majority come from Russia's ex-Soviet neighbours, where living standards fell further and faster when the Soviet economy disintegrated than in Russia itself.
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Indeed, no bilateral strategic arms reduction treaty with the Soviet Union or Russia has ever been ratified during a lame duck session.
Since the end of the Soviet Union, Russia has had only three presidents, including Medvedev, now up for re-election if he chooses to run.
This slight culminated in a more fundamental failure: while America was still hoping that Mr Gorbachev could reform the Soviet system, Russia and the rest were declaring independence.
What the Justice Department's 1996 memorandum on this issue fails to point out is that neither the United States, the Soviet Union nor Russia is a party to this 1978 convention--and that in fact 90 percent of the world's states have also refused to sign it.
The Tsarnaev family's connection with Russia is complex because of the intricate patchwork of ethnicities that comprises Russia and the former Soviet Union.
Putin's promise to scrap visas was seen as crucial to his country's prospects of winning the vote as nationals of almost all countries outside the former Soviet Union require the paperwork to visit Russia.
The last successful interplanetary mission for the program was in 1988 when Russia was still the Soviet Union.
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In April, almost 20 years after the Soviet Union disintegrated, Russia agreed to demarcate its land (though not its sea) border with Ukraine.
Simple: the Cold War and the arms race with Soviet Russia.
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Businessmen who came to be known as oligarchs amassed massive wealth and political influence in the 1990s during the privatization of Russia following the fall of the Soviet Union.
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The case raised a public curtain on the world of Russia's oligarchs, those who amassed massive wealth and political influence in the 1990s during the privatization of Russia following the fall of the Soviet Union.
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But Kosovo's few Serb leaders with the nerve to stay behind now seem likely to spurn the council, largely because western forces (plus a small number from Russia and the former Soviet Union) seem unable, so far, to stem a steady wave of revenge killings by Albanians.
Although none of these schemes is likely to come to anything, they all help to distract attention from the central point: Russia agreed to take on the Soviet Union's liabilities in return for acquiring its assets.
The oil, competition with Russia for influence in the former Soviet Union, plus Azerbaijan's strategic location, might suggest that America and the European Union should be content with Mr Aliev and the stability he seems to offer.
The range of material is impressive: the chapters deal with the growth of European cities before the industrial revolution, corruption in post-Soviet Russia, privatisation in Eastern Europe, local government in the United States, and more.
These efforts appear to center around opposition figure Bidzina Ivanishvili, a Georgian billionaire who made his fortune in the chaos of post-Soviet Russia.
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Although Obama received enthusiastic applause from his audience in Prague when he announced his intention to destroy the US's nuclear arsenal, drastically scale back its missile defense programs and forge a new alliance with Russia, his words were anything but music to the ears of the leaders of former Soviet satellites threatened by Russia.
Charlotte Hobson is the author of Black Earth City, which describes life in Russia during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
She spoke for many hours about her life and fate in the small Caucasus republic that has shaped much of what has happened in Russia since the end of the Soviet Union.
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Even without the fall of the Berlin Wall, and under Mikhail Gorbachev's new management, the Soviet Union would have struggled in vain (Russia struggles still) to adapt this behemoth to the information age and the microchip.
Many of the known thefts or attempted thefts of the most dangerous nuclear materials have taken place in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.
He goes on to argue, in a sweep that extends to Russia's privatisation programmes and left-over Russian communities in every last corner of the ex-Soviet empire, that the failure in Chechnya was symptomatic of a wider decline in Russia.
The road, built in 1875 and modernised in Soviet times, is now the main artery between Russia and Georgia.
Among the club's members are the United States, Russia, Turkey, three ex-Soviet republics in the Caucasus (Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia) and all the other countries of Europe.
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