Word: czaristic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...field hands and superior officials. A guide explained: "Two things still trouble them: Where are all the other workers, and who specifically tells each farmer what to plant?" In the Soviet Union, after 38 years of Communism, production of some major foods (meat, butter, milk) has fallen below czarist levels; in Iowa, during the same period, production has increased 60%. One visiting Russian last week credited Iowa's prosperity to good weather. "Our rainfall is so much less," he said. At the end of their first week in Iowa, the Russians had said nothing about the real difference between...
...Harvard. Brash, brilliant young Sorokin ran away from his father at the age of nine ("My father was good man, except when he was drunk"), managed to get himself enough education to enter the University of St. Petersburg. A social revolutionary, he was arrested three times by the Czarist police, served as one of Kerensky's secretaries, was later arrested three more times by the Communists. Exiled in 1922, he soon came to the U.S., and with the publication of his monumental Social and Cultural Dynamics, a study of the fluctuations of "sensate" and "ideational" cultures...
...should-know. Moreover, its prose is so plain that a roomful of safecrackers and their molls might well while away the hours before the gelignite goes up by browsing through the work. Its most startling feature is a questionnaire jig-sawed by Authors William Gerhardi (holder of the Czarist Order of St. Stanislav) and Prince Leopold Loewenstein ("a graduate of the University of Vienna"). Although both authors lack professional psychiatric qualifications, their couchside manner is soothing as a deep trance, their text chockablock with neat quotes from Greek Philosopher ("Know Thyself") Thales, Robert ("To see oursels as ithers...
...first Bolshevik War Commissar, "the flabby, panicky mob would be transformed in two or three weeks into an efficient fighting force. It needed good commanders, a few dozen experienced fighters, a dozen or so Communists ready to make any sacrifice." Commanders and experienced fighters were drawn from the old Czarist army, and the Red army soon had in its service tens of thousands of ex-soldiers. Among them was Georgy Zhukov...
Because other ex-Czarist officers had been going over to the Whites, often with their troops, the Bolsheviks in 1918 appointed commissars to every Red army unit: stone-hard Communists whose job it was to make men and officers accept "the spirit of revolutionary discipline," or else. Said Realist Trotsky: "An army cannot be built without reprisals. Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the army command has the death penalty in its arsenal." Thus began the pernicious commissar system which years later was to bring the army, and Soviet Russia itself, almost to destruction...