After the contents of the twentieth Party Congress speech sank in, there was a general revolt, logically enough, among the East European satellite regimes which Stalin had held in contemptuous subjugation.

"I didn't think that things could move so fast," he said later, on the eve of his own withdrawal from the political scene in 1994, after the Soviet Union had followed its satellite regimes to extinction.

Some European fighters against Communism understood that if ever Moscow withdrew the threat of the Red Army to put down the struggle of the captive nations, the satellite regimes would eventually collapse.

He was promoted to a Colonel, and was made in charge of military reconnaissance until that Soviet satellite regime collapsed in 1949.

In the East, Moscow sought shelter behind a phalanx of buffer states, imposing satellite regimes on lands once contested by kaisers, emperors, sultans and czars.

In 1958, the European championships happened to be in Budapest, and the Soviet satellite regime of Imre Nagy was happy to have Ujvary compete.

For 35 years, the Pact perpetuated the Stalinist concept of Soviet national security based on imperial expansion and control over satellite regimes in Eastern Europe.

First, the most immediate regional beneficiary of Iraq's downfall has been Iran, a power openly hostile to the U.S. and to America's satellite regimes on the Arabian Peninsula.

The new government of Montenegro led by Momir Bulatović was effectively a satellite regime of Serbia.

Today it is still a region where small, evil satellite regimes, like that of Mr Kadyrov, commit horrific violations of human rights.