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...rulers of the Communist world are reaping the results of decades of propaganda aimed at ensuring control in backward peasant societies. During the early days of the cold war, when it seemed that nothing could contain the virus of Communist expansion, pundits attempted to assure the West that most Marxist regimes took power only with the force of outside arms. On its own, Communism took root only in benighted countries like czarist Russia and feudal China. The more advanced countries of Eastern Europe -- Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland -- had the Marxist-Leninist system thrust upon them on the point of a Soviet...
Although much was made by Western observers of the original vulnerability of backward, predominantly peasant societies to a Marxist takeover, little attention has been paid to the effect of that characteristic on their subsequent development. The Marxist-Leninist regimes of the Soviet Union and China, as well as their variants in Cuba, Albania and North Korea, relied on the peasant mentality of the majority of their populations. Beyond making it possible for well-organized, small revolutionary groups to take power, this attribute also enabled them to consolidate power after the revolution and maintain control as the regime matured...
...most profitable companies on earth. But lulled by the success of Valium, whose U.S. patent expired four years ago, the company failed to keep pace in the '80s with such aggressive rivals as U.S.-based Merck and Swiss neighbors Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy. Symbolic of Hoffmann-La Roche's backward ways was the firm's thinly held stock, the most expensive traded anywhere. In the past year the price of a single share of Hoffmann-La Roche climbed to more than...
...York, where he took the name Barry Freed and busied himself with environmental issues. When Hoffman came out of hiding in 1980, on the cusp of the Reagan era, he seemed a bit like Rip Van Winkle, waking up in a new world that was moving not forward but backward into the somnolent 1950s...
...local theater production of Anatoli Rybakov's groundbreaking novel about Stalinist- era repression, Children of the Arbat. When Stalin stepped forward to deliver his monologue, a chilling silence enveloped the auditorium of the Lunacharsky Dramatic Theater. "It takes great cruelty to tap the great energy of a backward people," declaimed the provincial tyrant. "A dictator is great who can inspire love for himself through terror...