Soviet Union

A MARXIST, Antonio Gramsci, put it best. "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and and the new cannot be born," he wrote from his prison cell in the 1920s."

Never in recorded history has a major empire disintegrated as fast as the Soviet Union.The Roman Empire withered away over centuries. The British Empire evaporated in two decades. In contrast, the world's first communist state collapsed in about a year and will go out of business altogether at the year's end. The red flag flying over the Kremlin will be substituted with the tricolor of Russia, once the outlawed symbol of czardom.In 1917, when the Bolsheviks overthrew a weak and disorganized government in Russia, they inherited a country that, until World War I, had registered one of the fastest growth rates in the world.

This is a new dawn in the Soviet Union -- or whatever the country emerging from this week's failed coup will be called. Just as President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's six years of reforms altered the psychology of his fellow citizens, so have events of the past few days changed the political dynamics between the Kremlin and the republics. Mr. Gorbachev is back in his office today not only because of the personal courage and leadership of Russian President Boris Yeltsin but also because every other republic refused to join the reactionary takeover against the central government.

Washington -- IN CASE anyone is confused about which way official Russia is heading, I commend to your rapt attention the deliberate and most unconfusing acts of Moscow after the Croatian invasion of Krajina in early August.Pretending peace, the Yeltsin government announced that the answer to the bitter four-year-old war was to hold an "international conference" -- in Moscow.The Soviets, er, I mean the Russians, would of course plan it and oversee it. Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Croatian President Franjo Tudjman would be the first to travel to Moscow (historically both the center of world communism and the famous "third Rome" of Christianity, remember)

Back in the Cold War, it was common for scholars and pundits to remind us that the adversary was not necessarily the Soviet Union but Russia.Expansion, hegemony and influence sought by Stalin and his successors represented continuity not only with Lenin but also with the Imperial Russia of the czars.This explained the drive to a warm-water port, the presence in the Mediterranean and Arabian Seas, the bullying in Eastern Europe, the collision with China.It was fashionable to quote Alexis de Tocqueville writing in 1835 that the two great nations were the Russians and the Americans, each ''marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.

emigrated to the United States.IN THE LAST part of the 1970s and first part of 1980s, a wide stream of American movies rushed to the U.S.S.R., giving Soviet spectators an opportunity to learn in detail about American life.In that time, the VCR was uncommon thing in Soviet families and therefore many friends and acquaintances often gathered at the home of one who had a VCR to see the movies. Some video owners even made a business this way, charging people to see the movies. And because all tapes which came to the U.S.S.

The Kruzenshtern, a 378-foot, four-masted sailing vessel from the Soviet Union, is scheduled to begin a 10-day goodwill visit to the Inner Harbor tomorrow. And during its stay, some crew members will meet with state officials to observe Maryland's research into techniques of aquaculture.Operated by the USSR Ministry of Fisheries and carrying a crew of more than 200, including 160 cadets and eight school teachers, the ship was in Norfolk last weekend. It is making Baltimore its only other U.S. port of call before embarking July 22 to its home port of Talin, Estonia.

One on One is a weekly feature offering excerpts of interviews conducted by The Evening Sun with newsworthy business leaders. Roald Sagdeyev is director of the East-West Science and Technology Center at the University of Maryland at College Park. A former science adviser to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Sagdeyev moved to Maryland last year after marrying Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of Dwight Eisenhower.Q. Can you give us a little history about how you started the East/West Science and Technology Center here at the University of Maryland?

MOSCOW -- The United States and the Soviet Union agreed yesterday to end arms shipments to the warring sides in Afghanistan Jan. 1, removing the crucial element of superpower supplies from the 12-year-old civil war.The two sides said they would push for a cease-fire, a cutoff of arms from other sources and free elections after Jan. 1, according to their official joint statement. They also agreed not to accelerate their own arms shipments before the cutoff.Both two major Afghan opposition groups and Afghan President Najibullah welcomed the cutoff proposal.

This is supposed to be a festive season in the Soviet Union, a time when military parades step briskly, fireworks flare and cities are draped in red to honor the 1917 Bolshevik takeover. But as the Communist experiment in utopia turns 74 tomorrow, there is little celebration. Instead, a worried nation wonders whether there will be enough food and heat for the approaching winter.Five years after Mikhail S. Gorbachev launched his drive to breathe new life into the crumbling communist system, that system is dead.