Word: centralize
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...first time since the days when Trotsky led the opposition to Stalin in the '20s, Pravda last week suddenly published the proceedings of the Soviet Communist Party's 253-man Central Committee Plenum while it was going on. By this precedent-smashing maneuver, Nikita Khrushchev sought to broadcast as swiftly and dramatically as possible his speech signaling a shift in Soviet agricultural policy. Acting so abruptly, in such untimely fashion just six weeks before the 21st Party Congress is due to meet, Boss Nikita gave many the idea that he was in something of a sweat...
These decisions were made at Wuchang in central China, where every prominent Communist in the nation, save one,* gathered for two weeks of intensive and secret discussion. The news of Mao's stepping down as chairman of the People's Republic of China was confided by the Foreign Ministry to trusted outside diplomats (not invited: the British, the Dutch, the Yugoslavs) after Nationalist China-which says it has an agent inside the party councils-first spread the word. A week passed before China's 650 million-people were told the news...
...Wuchang meeting, the Central Committee admitted that the communes were in trouble in two areas: 1) the uprooting of families, which caused violent opposition as men, women, children and old people were herded into separate barracks, and 2) great unrest over wages and work, from peasants laboring sometimes from 19 to 20 hours a day. The Central Committee seemed surprised to learn that many local leaders were rude and dictatorial, and that they warned commune members to keep their mouths shut and "do what you are told...
Tidying Up. A committee resolution proposed that a worker might be more efficient if he got at least eight hours' sleep a night and was fed "decent food." The Central Committee promised a "tidying up, consolidation and expansion" of the rural communes-but then revealingly added that, for the present, communes would not be extended to urban centers because "bourgeois ideology is still prevalent in the cities." Tibet (where Red troops have their hands full with the rebellious Khamba tribesmen) was also exempted from the dubious joys of the people's communes. The Communists now soft-pedal their...
...fancies himself the greatest living Communist theoretician was retreating from his boast of achieving true Communism ("To each according to his need") ahead of Russia, which had a 30-year head start and is still far from achieving it. Retreating from its great leap forward, the Central Party's resolution used the words gradual and gradually in times in 40 pages. The document was peppered with dilatory phrases: "It takes time." "We should not be in a hurry." "We should wait a bit." "There is yet insufficient experience." "Socialism must continue for a long time before we achieve Communism...