Word: aesopian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Gorbachev's opponents are equally aware that much is at stake. The Soviet tradition of unity among all leaders still forbids any direct criticism of Gorbachev's policies. Such debate as does occur is carried on in Aesopian language, and history is currently the favored supplier of code words. Thus when Yegor Ligachev and other conservatives cry that denunciations of Stalin are shaking people's faith in the Soviet system, they are really saying that perestroika and glasnost are going too far. Gorbachev's partisans get the point, and respond with redoubled attacks on Stalin and his admirers today...
History, wrote Gibbon, is little more than a "register of crimes, sorrows and misfortunes." It is, equally often, a study in black ironies or the fatal mechanisms of tragedy. Sometimes history is even a cautionary tale, an Aesopian fable on the folly of blindness or greed or lust. But history is rarely a fairy tale, a narrative that instructs as well as inspires. Still less often is it a morality play, in which the forces of corruption and redemption, of extravagance and modesty collide in perfect symmetry...