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Great offensive by Germans (March–June). Americans' first important battle role at Château-Thierry—as they and French stop German advance (June). Second Battle of the Marne (July–Aug.)—start of Allied offensive at Amiens, St. Mihiel, etc. Battles of the Argonne and Ypres panic German leadership (Sept.–Oct.). British offensive in Palestine (Sept.). Germans ask for armistice (Oct. 4). British armistice with Turkey (Oct.). German Kaiser abdicates (Nov.). Hostilities cease on Western Front (Nov. 11). This atmosphere is strikingly similar to that which existed in post-Imperial Russia in 1917 and 1918, which led to the bloody dissolution of the democratically elected Constituent Assembly on January 18, 1918 by Lenin's Bolsheviks. Vladimir Brovkin, an expert on contemporary Russian politics and executive editor of DEMOKRATIZATSIYA, The Journal of Post-Soviet Affairs, argued during a briefing at RFE/RL's Washington office on 14 January that the stage is set for a further dissolution of the Russian Federation -- even beyond the point where a democratic leader would be able to pull it back together. Brovkin asserts that the Russian people are less prepared today for democracy than they were in 1918. Russians see government in terms of a power that rules arbitrarily over them, not as a system in which they play a meaningful role. This ruler-and-ruled ethic was strengthened by decades of totalitarian rule by the Soviet nomenklatura, which remains in power today in spite of the fall of the Soviet Union eight years ago. In addition, the ties that bound together the diverse regions and peoples of Russia dissolved along with the fall of Soviet power.
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