| A | B |
|---|
| Mikhail Gorbachev | born 1931, Soviet statesman; general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party (1985--91): president (1988--91). Nobel peace prize 1990. His reforms ended the Communist monopoly of power and led to the break-up of the Soviet Union |
| Tony Blair | born 1953, British politician; leader of the Labour Party from 1994; prime minister (1997--2007) |
| Velvet Revolution | the peaceful overthrow of a government, esp a communist government, as occurred in Czechoslovakia in late 1989 |
| Boris Yeltin | the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999. |
| European Community | an economic and political association of European States that came into being in 1967, when the legislative and executive bodies of the European Economic Community merged with those of the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Atomic Energy Community: subsumed into the European Union in 1993 |
| Vaclav Havel | born 1936, Czech dramatist and statesman: founder of the Civil Forum movement for political change: president of Czechoslovakia (1989--92) and of the Czech Republic (1993--2003). His plays include The Garden Party (1963) and Redevelopment (1989) |
| Lech Walesa | born 1943, Polish statesman: president of Poland (1990--95); leader of the independent trade union Solidarity 1980--90; Nobel peace prize 1983 |
| START II | bilateral treaty between the United States of America and Russia on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. I |
| Nicholas Ceausescu | a Romanian communist politician. He was General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and as such was the country's second and last Communist leader. He was also the country's head of state from 1967 to 1989. |
| Glasnost | the declared public policy within the Soviet Union of openly and frankly discussing economic and political realities: initiated under Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. |
| Treaty of Maastricht | signed on 7 February 1992 by the members of the European Community it created the European Union and led to the creation of the single European currency, the euro. |
| Persian gulf war | A war between the forces of the United Nations, led by the United States, and those of Iraq that followed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. The United Nations forces, called the Coalition, expelled Iraqi troops from Kuwait in March 1991. |
| Commonwealth of Independent States | an alliance of former Soviet republics formed in December 1991, including: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Abbreviation: C.I.S. |
| START I | a bilateral treaty between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms.The treaty was signed on 31 July 1991 and entered into force on 5 December 1994.[1] The treaty barred its signatories from deploying more than 6,000 nuclear warheads atop a total of 1,600 ICBMs, inter-continental ballistic missiles, and bombers. |
| Ethnic cleansing | the systematic forced removal of ethnic or religious groups from a given territory with the intent of creating a territory inhabited by people of a homogeneous or pure ethnicity, religion, culture, and history. The forces applied may be various forms of forced migration (deportation, population transfer), as well as mass murder, and intimidation. |
| Perestroika | the policy of reconstructing the economy, etc, of the former Soviet Union under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachov |
| Helmut Kohl | born 1930, German political leader: chancellor of West Germany (1982–90); chancellor of Germany 1990–98. |
| Dayton Peace Agreement | the peace agreement reached at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, United States, in November 1995, and formally signed in Paris on 14 December 1995. These accords put an end to the three and a half-year long Bosnian War, one of the armed conflicts in the former Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. |
| Slobodan Milosevic | 1941--2006, Serbian politician, president of Serbia (1989--97) and of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1997--2000). He supported ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992--95) and Kosovo (1998--99). He was ousted in 2000 and brought to trial (2001) for war crimes; died in prison before the trial was concluded |
| Margaret Thatcher | British stateswoman; leader of the Conservative Party (1975--90); prime minister (1979--90) |
