Word: bolshevik
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Just before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, it looked as though the Westernizers had decisively won. Russia was by then a Western-oriented constitutional monarchy with the fastest-growing capitalist economy in Europe. Yet two years later, the Bolsheviks were declaring ideological war on Europe...
Until five years ago, his life read like a Bolshevik parable, though shadowed by personal tragedy. He was born in 1941 in the town of Pozarevac, near Belgrade, where he still keeps a modest weekend home. His father was a seminary-trained teacher of religion from Montenegro and his mother a fervent communist; the two quarreled incessantly over ideological issues. Early on, his father abandoned the family, went back to Montenegro and later committed suicide. An uncle, a general in the army, died by his own hand as well. When Slobodan's mother killed herself in 1974, she reportedly left...
...Bolshevik revolutionaries were hardly unique in renaming places to mark their arrival on the world scene; the French Jacobins even redid the months of the calendar. But the communists carried the process to extremes, both to honor their heroes and to Russify the hard-to-pronounce appellations of the territories, like Georgia and Central Asia, that they added to their polyglot empire. Thus, the ancient Azerbaijani trading city of Gyandzha became Kirovabad to honor Sergei Kirov (he got a ballet company too), who headed the Communist Party in the republic in the 1920s. Nizhni Novgorod was renamed Gorky...
RUSSIA. "Since 1917 we have been living under the occupation of Jewish fascists," says Valeri Yemelyanov, leader of one of several so-called patriotic groups. His view is totally false: though some leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution were Jewish, Joseph Stalin and his successors practiced anti-Semitism almost as zealously as the czars. No matter: many Russians are looking for someone to blame for the shortages and hunger that have followed the collapse of communism, and some are finding that all-purpose, historic scapegoat, the Jew. Others focus on the Central Asians and residents of the Caucasus area who sell...
Yeltsin can never forget that the Bolshevik Revolution came to power on Lenin's promise to give the people bread. The shock-therapy program will be under pressure to show some quick results, or popular unrest could grow. An elderly woman begging on a Moscow street corner last week cried, "Please give me some money. I cannot even afford to buy bread now." Yeltsin has given the Russians pain; now he must deliver the gain...