Word: communisme
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...could such a monster gain absolute ascendancy over the Soviet Union? In this book Medvedev backs away from his earlier position that Stalinism was essentially an aberration on the road to a more benevolent Communism envisioned by Lenin. The historian has re-examined the totalitarian system created by Lenin and now suspects that Stalinism sprang from Leninism, as many American Sovietologists have concluded. Though Medvedev never fully confronts this issue, he emphatically makes one crucial point: when Lenin banned all opposition groups and factions in 1921, the ensuing one-party dictatorship was "a very important condition for Stalin's usurpation...
Once lulled by the cuddly Communism of Deng Xiaoping, foreigners now take seriously the tales of wall-to-wall surveillance. In addition to telephone taps, the apartments (notably bedrooms), offices and cars of foreigners are bugged for sound and outfitted with tiny optical-filament cameras. Chinese security assured one foreign intelligence officer that the accumulation of tapes in a variety of languages was no problem: the agency has plenty of fellow travelers to deliver sophisticated, nuanced translations...
...work of reinventing Communism belongs to a new generation of party leaders who must first grasp what much of the world already knows: that economic reform and political reform are impossible without each other. That generation, personified and led by Gorbachev, may have arrived at the pinnacle of power in the Soviet Union. In China it is still waiting for Deng Xiaoping and his fellow aged revolutionaries to accept the judgment of that lone, anonymous man in front of the tanks...
Last week's message was that the trends have continued long and conclusively enough to put new and primary emphasis on the management of Communism's decline, perhaps its disintegration, certainly its transformation. We saw it coming. But that is different from seeing it happening, before our eyes...
Perhaps so. But it was not too early for the world to recognize Poland's remarkable political performance for what it was: in the year of Communism's historic identity crisis -- a time of glasnost in the Soviet Union, brutal repression in China and political unease in the rest of Eastern Europe -- Poland had launched a democratic experiment unique in the Communist world. "It makes us rethink the proposition that Stalinism is eternal," said a U.S. official. "Now we don't know for sure that Stalinism is above being reformed...