| A | B |
|---|
| Politburo | the ruling committee of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union |
| Mikhail Gorbachev | Leader of the Soviet Union from 1985- 1991 |
| Glasnost | Soviet policy of openness to the free flow of ideas and information introduced in 1985 by Mikal Gorbachev |
| Perestroika | a restricting of the Soviet Union to permit more local decision making, begun by Mikal Gorbachev |
| Solidarity | a Polish labor union that during the 1980s became the main force of opposition to communist rule in Poland |
| Reunification | a bringing together of again of things that have been separated like East Germany and West Germany |
| Boris Yeltsin | Political opponent of Gorbachev who became president of Russia |
| shock therapy | an economic program implemented in Russia by Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s involving an abrupt shift form a command economy to a free market economy |
| ethnic cleansing | a policy of murder and other acts of brutality by which Serbs hoped to eliminate Bosnia’s Muslim population after the breakup Yugoslavia |
| Coup | a sudden seizure of political power |
| Dissent | an opponent of government authority. |
| Bosnia- Herzegovina | Part of the former Yugoslavia in which Serbs fought a civil war with Muslims and where ethnic cleansing took place. |
