Word: communisme
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...revolution carried out in his name would lead to the establishment of a socialist state, a temporary phase during which a revolutionary elite would rule in the name of the working class until all vestiges of the old order were dismantled. Then socialism would give way to true Communism; the state would wither away. So would the elite, or "the dictatorship of the proletariat," as it became known...
Lenin regarded all that as foolish, but not terribly inconvenient. He paid a certain amount of lip service to the Marxist prophecy, while in his policies he set about battening down the here and now of socialism and deferring forever the promised millennium of true Communism. The last thing he wanted, or would tolerate, was any move that would cause the state to wither or that would mitigate the dictatorship of the Communist Party...
...terrors of Stalinism. But it is hard to deny that Marxism-particularly as interpreted by Lenin-provided many of the concepts, attitudes and institutions that made Stalinism possible. Ex-Communists such as Arthur Koestler, author of the famous anti-Stalinist novel Darkness at Noon, have argued persuasively that Communism is corrupt and corrupting because of the brutal way that power is often attained and maintained. As the absolute embodiment of both power and corruption, Stalin represented an extreme but not an aberration...
...insecurity "flowing from Russia's relative weakness and vulnerability." Richard Pipes, the hard-line anti-Soviet historian from Harvard who now serves as a specialist on Communist affairs for the National Security Council staff, stresses offensive over the defensive drives. "Militarism," he says, "is as central to Soviet Communism as the pursuit of profit is to capitalist societies," and this militarism has mixed with what he calls "Russia's traditional expansionism...
...Soviets, like most paranoids, have real enemies, notably the Chinese, but in many respects the Americans as well. Reagan's boast that the last chapter of Communism is now being written and that the West will "transcend" its Soviet rival must have sounded to listeners in Moscow every bit as threatening as Nikita Khrushchev's famous vow 25 years ago, "We will bury you," sounded to American ears...