Word: brezhnevs
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...cold war really over? No doubt the withdrawal from Afghanistan marks a change. It signifies the demise of the Brezhnev Doctrine, first enunciated with the invasion of Czechoslovakia exactly 20 years ago. Brezhnev declared that socialism will suffer no losses: countries that come under Marxist- Leninism remain under Marxist-Leninism. Afghanistan is the first breach in that doctrine. (Grenada is too small to count.) Enthusiastic believers in the demise of the cold war also point to Gorbachev's words to show that the Soviet Union, apostle of revolution ("national liberation"), has become the defender of stability. A favorite quote...
Another recent elaboration in the press of the conventional wisdom puts it this way: "In the heyday of Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union tried hard to promote Communism in the Third World . . . Now, under what might be called the Gorbachev Doctrine, the Kremlin has adopted a more cautious stance, backing away from confrontation." Why? Because "the Kremlin has been disappointed by the inability of Third World Marxists to impose stable Communist systems on underdeveloped societies...
When I saw Ruml again, two years later, the "Brezhnev winter" had descended on Prague. Ruml, along with 3,000 other journalists, had lost his job and been expelled from the Communist Party. His new career: working as a crane operator with a road gang. Ruml's wife Jirina Hrabkova had been removed as the moderator of a popular radio program, and was selling sausages at the Prague Zoo. Worst of all, their two sons Jan, 17, and Jakob, 15, were hounded out of high school and denied a university education...
...celebrate triumph after triumph, from the success of the Revolution to victory in World War II to the launch of Sputnik. They gloss over Stalin's purges, the starvation of millions during the collectivization of farms, military blunders that nearly lost the war to Hitler and corruption in the Brezhnev era. Meanwhile, an elementary primer claims, "The leadership of the party of Communists is working well and is building a new, happy life...
Stalin despised it as "decadent bourgeois formalism" and had it locked away. Khrushchev called it excrement and branded its creators "pederasts." Brezhnev ordered bulldozers to smash it into the ground at an outdoor exhibit. Such has been the fate of Russia's modernist art at the hands of dictators bent on enforcing their philistine tastes with the whole armamentarium of the totalitarian state. Even Mikhail Gorbachev has found that the tradition of putting down avant-garde art dies hard among cultural bureaucrats. As a result, the visual arts have been far slower than literature and music to benefit from glasnost...