Word: communisme
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This time, it's personal. The first fall of Communism, in 1989 and 1990, was institutional. Now, the death of Kim II Sung has marked the beginning of a second decline, one based entirely on the personalities that built the Communist monoliths of the world...
...most important factor in the coming days will be China's attitude towards Kim Jong Il. Kim II Sung had managed to maintain friendly relations with both China and the U.S.S.R. before the collapse of Communism in the West. The younger Kim, who is seen as more brash and capricious than his father, will have to continue to rely on China for support in military preparations and in diplomatic circles. Moves towards genuine independence from the larger nation could render China a fearsome enemy rather than a cautious ally...
...subdued greeting on his arrival in Warsaw today, following the president's earlier warm embrace by a celebratory crowd in Latvia. The distinctly different reactions were symptomatic of the moods in the two countries. Poland is undergoing a period of political bickering and some disenchantment following its emergence from communism, while the Baltic Republics are still enjoying a boom following their more recent release from decades of central economic planning. In a tip of his hat to the Baltic success, Clinton announced a U.S. fund that would invest in the small but growing economies. He made another crowd-pleasing promise...
Today all the hopes, anxieties and contradictions of Russia's fumbling transition from communist monolith to Western-style free market are reflected in this city of 9 million. The crumbling of communism has rendered it a city adrift -- a metropolis that has lost its sense of historic mission and is struggling to find a new identity worthy of its former grandeur. Moscow finds itself seized by a debilitating sort of urban schizophrenia. On one hand, a small but highly visible minority of residents are enjoying the rich possibilities of upheaval. "Life has never been more exciting in this city!" gushes...
Moscow has not always been this way. In 1916, a year before communism's whirlwind transformed Russia into the Soviet Union, the poet Marina Tsvetayeva described her native city as a vast hostelry of "forty times forty" churches, where small pigeons rose above the golden domes and the floors below were polished by kisses of the faithful. Under the Soviet regime, with its Stalinist housing bunkers and oppressive military bearing, the city became a grimmer place, but one that was anchored, orderly, predictable, even if, to many outsiders, drab and downcast. By 1976, the British journalist Geoffrey Bocca could describe...