Word: 20th
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...while in this way Lenin may be the central actor who begins the 20th century, he is the least knowable of characters. As a boy growing up in Simbirsk, Lenin distinguished himself in Latin and Greek. The signal event of his youth--the event that radicalized him--came in 1887, when his eldest brother Alexander, a student at the University of St. Petersburg, was hanged for conspiring to help assassinate Czar Alexander III. As a lawyer, Lenin became increasingly involved in radical politics, and after completing a three-year term of Siberian exile, he began his rise as the leading...
...Brezhnev era, Lenin's dream state had devolved into a corrupt and failing dictatorship. Only the Lenin cult persisted. The ubiquitous Lenin was a symbol of the repressive society itself. Joseph Brodsky, the great Russian poet of the late 20th century, began to hate Lenin at about the time he was in the first grade, "not so much because of his political philosophy or practice...but because of the omnipresent images which plagued almost every textbook, every class wall, postage stamps, money, and what not, depicting the man at various ages and stages of his life...This face in some...
Democracy has been around for a bit, but the 20th century has been the crucial century of its trial, testing and triumph. At the century's start, democracy was thought to be spreading irresistibly across the world. Then the Great War, the war of 1914-18, showed that democracy could not assure peace. Postwar disillusion activated democracy's two deadly foes: fascism and communism. Soon the Great Depression in the 1930s showed that democracy could not assure prosperity either, and the totalitarian creeds gathered momentum...
F.D.R. was the best loved and most hated American President of the 20th century. He was loved because, though patrician by birth, upbringing and style, he believed in and fought for plain people--for the "forgotten man" (and woman), for the "third of the nation, ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." He was loved because he radiated personal charm, joy in his work, optimism for the future. Even Charles de Gaulle, who well knew Roosevelt's disdain for him, succumbed to the "glittering personality," as he put it, of "that artist, that seducer." "Meeting him," said Winston Churchill, "was like...
...realist in means but an idealist in ends. Above all, F.D.R. stood for humanity against ideology. The 20th was the most ideological of centuries. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin systematically sacrificed millions to false and terrible dogmas. Even within the democracies, ideologues believed that the Great Depression imposed an either/or choice: if you abandon laissez-faire, you are condemned to total statism. "Partial regimentation cannot be made to work," said Herbert Hoover, "and still maintain live democratic institutions...