ABSTRACT
The decade of the 1980s was an epoch-making period in the twentieth century, featuring as it did the fall of the Soviet empire and the victory of the United States and its allies in the cold war.
At the beginning of the decade it looked as if the power of the Soviet Union under the firm leadership of Brezhnev was intact, as demonstrated by the holding of the Moscow Olympic Games , despite a boycott by the United States and many free-world nations, including Japan (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1981: 158-62).
