Word: communist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...While Bush can be sure of a rapturous welcome in Tirana, the same is no longer true of all post-communist European countries, including some others on his current itinerary. In the Czech Republic, more than 60% of citizens are against his missile defense initiative, not because they agree with Moscow (which has also, loudly, opposed the plan) but because they fear being dragged into another superpower slugfest. Surprisingly, Czechs view Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, more highly than they do Bush, although polls show they still would prefer the U.S. as a neighbor...
...failure of the U.S. to grant visa-free travel to eastern Europeans-their fellow E.U.-members in France and Germany can enter American borders freely-is another sore point. Bush has used his eastern European visits to trumpet a "freedom agenda," correctly asserting that, with their recent experiences under communist tyranny, eastern Europeans share his goal of spreading democracy around the world. But for now, the Albanians are the only ones supporting it in the streets...
Still, these liberties do little to blunt the book's power as literature - or, perhaps more important, as an allegory of Kapuscinski's own communist-era Poland. Indeed, as The Emperor was going to press, the Polish government approved an extravagant flood-control program for the Vistula River; the author phoned in a new passage about a costly dam built by Selassie. "Everything is a metaphor," Kapuscinski once said. "My ambition is to find the universal...
...dealing with the developed West. Kapuscinski's sympathies lay with the wretched of the earth - the patient, plodding masses of countries suffused with sunshine and suffering. He began his career at a time when former colonies in Asia and Africa were gaining their independence: a big story for a communist-bloc press agency. Besides, Poland had itself been kicked around by imperial powers, so Kapuscinski knew what it was like - as he wrote in The Shadow of the Sun - "to have nothing, to wander into the unknown and wait for history to utter a kind word...
Since the beginning of that war, a new élite--the siloviki from the FSB (the renamed KGB) and the subservient new economic oligarchs--has come to dominate policymaking under Putin's control. This new élite embraces a strident nationalism as a substitute for communist ideology while engaging in thinly veiled acts of violence against political dissenters. Putin almost sneeringly dismissed the murder of a leading Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, who exposed crimes against the Chechens. Similarly, troubling British evidence of Russian involvement in the London murder of an outspoken FSB defector produced little more than official Russian ridicule...