USSR

One hallmark of people of my age group is calling Russia (俄羅斯) USSR (蘇聯).

USSR stands for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which collapsed in 1991.

And the good old Russia came back, together with a number of other countries that we have difficulty to pronounce their names or trace their origin.

Maybe that's the reason they couldn't stay as a single nation.

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When I first read the Animal Farm of George Orwell in the secondary school, I was naive enough to believe it was a story of the modern China - in fact, it was not difficult to find characters corresponding to the Old Major, Napoleon, Snowball, and so forth.

But, of course I was wrong - just that the history of Russia essentially repeated itself in our own country.

The worrying bit is: Would the story after the novel also happen a second time?