Word: autocrats
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...only major Communist or Socialist leader to lose his life (no females here) in the 1989-90 "Velvet Revolution" was Nicolau Ceaucescu, ex-autocrat of Romania. By 'major', the longtime existence of a self-created cult of personality is implied. Construction teams never finished the huge residential complex that Ceaucescu had commissioned towards his own greater glory. His and his wife's brutal totalitarianism ended with a hail of bullets and mutilation of their corpses...
Kreizler, an intellectual autocrat of almost Sherlockian self-assurance, takes up the pursuit with a somewhat addlepated New York Times reporter named Moore; his pal Sara, a gun-packing early feminist with bumptious ambitions to be a police officer; and a pair of brothers named Isaacson, who are scientifically up-to-date detectives. From the dimmest of clues, this team deduces a shape in the fog: an intelligent, physically powerful, driven individual who was abused sexually as a child but raised in a strictly religious family. The hunt is on, with much clambering over rooftops, chasing about in cabs...
...rising disapproval ratings for both of them. Neither candidate is getting across a message that he can be an urban Mr. Fixit. Dinkins comes off as a courtly but unimaginative bureaucrat with a taste for fussy clothes and fancy ceremonies. Giuliani has a reputation as a humorless autocrat with an abrasive management style that involves shooting first and asking questions later...
...truth; narodnost, or accessibility to the people; and partinost, or Party spirit. The artists now appear in the treble guise of visionaries, heroes and victims. Most art lovers probably believe, on this point, that Stalin betrayed the revolution and are unwilling to think of Lenin as the savage autocrat he was; they are apt to suppose, moreover, that Lenin (who had a stony immunity to visual art) personally evoked this creative surge, which is another myth...
When the revolution erupted in 1917, Nicholas reacted with bizarre passivity. He abdicated and went quietly into exile in Tobolsk, relieved to have exchanged his gilded prison for a more tranquil confinement. But this soft-spoken autocrat, whose exquisite manners and flickering will had once led a courtier to describe him as "nodding tirelessly in opposite directions," was no match for the hard men of Bolshevism. Their fledgling regime, already embroiled in intramural disputes, was threatened by enemies on all sides, and they saw the Romanovs as both a potential threat and a trump card. From the relative comfort...