Word: communisme
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...recovery of memory' movement," says prominent Spanish historian Paul Preston. "You're dealing with a really complicated social phenomenon here - the families of the beneficiaries of Franco's victory. All they've ever been told by their parents and grandparents was about how they did the right thing, smashing communism and all that, and now they're being told that these people were little better than Hitler. It makes them very uncomfortable." (See pictures of the rise of Hitler...
...written portions investigate the Soviet Union and its collapse from most every geographical, social and ideological perspective. But the collection’s subtitle is misleading. “The Wall in My Head” isn’t a meditation on the end of communism in the Soviet Bloc, but its history entire—its successes, its failures, and its absurdities. Thought-provoking, oddly nostalgic, and ultimately inconclusive, “The Wall in My Head” is a worthy investigation of a way of life which, for all its flaws, found a place...
...Wall In My Head” is by no means an indictment of communism. On the contrary, several of the stories and essays seem to almost pine for its simplicity and order. One of the finest essays in the collection, “Farewell to the Queue,” by Vladimir Sorokin, uses queues as a metaphor for the togetherness and order of Soviet society—a “quasi-surrogate for church,” which taught obedience while giving people time to ponder the advantages of socialism. In his view, the market economy replaced order...
Mostly, “The Wall in My Head” is about communism and the people who lived under it—not when it collapsed under its own weight, but when it threatened to become the world’s dominant form of government. The authors of the anthology, as disparate in their ideologies as in their backgrounds, reach no conclusions. They make few grand claims about communism as a system of government. To some extent, the lack of some overarching statement or idea is frustrating, but it simultaneously feels just. Instead of prescribing a specific view...
...Russia's laws have long been weak and unspecific when it comes to combating organized crime, part of the reason that the underworld has thrived in the country in the post-communism years. But the government may finally be getting serious about cracking down on the mafia. In the wake of the embarrassing release of the mobsters in September, President Dmitri Medvedev proposed harsh new legislation targeting organized-crime figures, making a rare admission that "the legal code does not have a response to the increasing social dangers of these crimes." Within weeks, the parliament approved the measures...