Word: avtorkhanov
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...assure permanent control, the party sows the land with 3,000,000 paid propagandists and 3,000,000 "inspectors." Even its spies have spies. Against this party apparatus, the government itself counts merely as a pro forma showcase structure existing only to do the party's bidding. As Avtorkhanov writes: "A modern Commu nist state can exist without its official state apparatus, but it cannot exist without its party apparatus...
...this dualistic state, the Foreign Minister, for example, is a figurehead. The true Foreign Minister is the party, whose foreign policy, insists Avtorkhanov, has not changed since Lenin's time. Coexistence, he adds, is no more than a tactical pause in the grand and unalterable plan to turn the world into a Communist state...
...Soviet foreign policy regards its obligations as conditional," Avtorkhanov writes. "The Communists themselves will decide when the time has come to put an end to 'coexistence.' " His main authority, among many others, is a pronouncement of the Seventh Party Congress in 1918, still in effect: "The Central Committee is given the authority to break at any time all peace treaties with imperialistic and bourgeois governments and declare war on them...
Perturbation-Proof. Avtorkhanov's book may tempt some readers to conclude that Communism carries the seeds of its own failure. The author acknowl edges that Russia has flopped as an industrialist (half the state enterprises are run at a loss), as. a farmer, even as a seminal example to other Communist states. Writes Avtorkhanov of the deepening schism between Moscow and Peking: "The contradictions are so deep that in perspective they make war between these two Communist states, if not unavoidable, at least fully possible...
...Avtorkhanov concedes that Brezhnev and Kosygin have granted what amounts to unprecedented concessions to democracy. Russian industry has introduced the profit motive. The Red army, which played a hand in Khrushchev's fall, has been given political rights and powers that, for the first time, crack the monolithic power structure of the state. But Avtorkhanov warns that none of these alterations should give much comfort to the West. Russian Communism, he says, comes perilously near to being self-perpetuating, proof against every perturbation beneath it: "The party apparatus is superior not only to the state but to the party...