Word: bolshevik
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...been in power for four years. In some ways, he was running for a second term in last Sunday's election of a new Congress of People's Deputies, seeking a mandate for his three-pronged pitchfork of perestroika (economic restructuring), glasnost (openness) and demokratizatsiya (democratization). Not since the Bolsheviks were trounced in the Constituent Assembly races of November 1917 had citizens of the Soviet Union been given the chance to vote in a real national election. This time some highly visible keepers of the Bolshevik faith fared poorly. But for Gorbachev the results could be, if he uses them...
...Aviation Industry, Pamyat (memory) has grown into a violence-tinged social movement that blends ardent nationalism with virulent anti-Semitism. To Pamyat's conspiracy theorists, an evil alliance of Zionists and Freemasons is responsible for most of the world's woes; Jews who were at the heart of the Bolshevik Revolution are blamed for the failures of Communism...
...important to remember that the Great Russian Revolution was not great, and it was not Russian," says Dmitri Vasiliev, the group's principal theoretician. "It was organized by Jews." Vasiliev is mildly contemptuous of Gorbachev ("He has no clear thoughts and no perseverance") and calls Lenin a "merciless Bolshevik." At the movement's noisy rallies, hecklers are often attacked by Pamyat toughs who are the Soviet version of skinheads. Soviet Jews are concerned that Pamyat's modest membership of several thousand is an inadequate index of its power. Says Boris Kelman, a Leningrad refusenik: "Pamyat is not only protected...
Nominally, Soviet women enjoy the same rights as men. The Bolshevik Revolution promised political and social equality for the sexes, and the constitution guarantees it. But while women today are better educated, healthier and more fully represented in the professions and on local government councils than their mothers' generation was, they remain second- class citizens. At work -- women hold 51% of the jobs in the Soviet Union -- they find themselves confined to low-paying positions and are noticeably absent from management posts. In the Communist Party, they make up 29% of the membership, but no woman sits in the ruling...
...decades of Soviet history, much of it officially ignored or obfuscated -- and nearly all of it haunted by the ghost of Joseph Stalin. But Gorbachev had insisted there should be no "blank pages" in his country's past. Now, in an address marking the 70th anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, he had an ideal occasion to demonstrate the glasnost (openness) that has become a watchword of his 31 months in power. What he revealed instead was the limits of glasnost and the cautious path he must tread between foot-dragging conservatives and impatient reformers within the Communist Party leadership...