| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The Cold War has now been over for nearly two decades. In that time, a whole generation has grown up, both in the United States and Russia, with no memory of the conflict that defined world politics for half a century. Not only do today's college students have no memory of even the final stages of the Cold War, many were not even born when the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991. For an ever increasing share of young people in both countries, seminal events from the Cuban missile crisis to Ronald Reagan's stirring call to "tear down this wall" occupy approximately the same place in individual historical consciousness as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand or the Battle of Waterloo. That observation may seem obvious, but it has profound implications for the future course of relations between the two former Cold War rivals.
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