Word: brutality
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...course, these changes have not come easily, and reform is under great strain. Most Russians have felt the pain of economic dislocation, rampant crime and corruption. Many have been disillusioned by a lack of accountability in government and by the brutal war in Chechnya...
...advance guard of the capitalism that arrived in Moscow was armies of speculators, barons of the black market, gangs of drug dealers, armed, aggressive racketeers, brutal, ruthless, powerful mafias. People were terrified. It is not capitalism per se but the form in which it first appeared that supplied Communists with fresh followers. I remember walking around Moscow with my friend Syoma. The city was cold and dirty. One could easily break one's leg because the sidewalks, uncleared for months, were covered with mountains of ice. The squares and the streets near train and subway stations overflowed with vendors peddling...
...acid. "He is considered to be the most wanted of the Mafia fugitives," says Burke. "He is not at all the old type of honorable Mafia, who have rules about hurting women and children, but more of the new type of Mafioso, who are really brutal." Brusca is also accused of masterminding the 1993 car bombs that damaged the Uffizi museum in Florence, two churches in Rome and an art gallery in Milan. He planned the bombings following the arrest of Salvatero Riina, the Mafia's Boss of bosses, and Pope John Paul II's public condemnation of La Cosa...
...year after Ehrenburg's death, and comments offhandedly that it was "a cause Ehrenburg surely would have supported." Rubinstein seems to have forgotten his own account of how, during the similar 1956 revolt in Hungary, Ehrenburg was dispatched to a foreign writers' conference to defend Khrushchev's brutal intervention against criticism, a job he performed without complaint. True, Ehrenburg was no fawning Stalinist; but to imply that he was some sort of conscientious objector trivializes the sacrifices made by real dissidents...
...retro-projection that amounts to a search for their own lost, sweet, brilliant, childish selves. They indulge in a manic idealization of their young; it is the obverse of child battering but sometimes has equally fatal effects. The idealization too savors of some indirect exhibitionism that, seen in a brutal light, comes just short of amounting to child sacrifice...