Word: czaristic
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...sends the American body politic into spasms of divisive debate. That eternally troubled, troublesome country is the oldest and most vivid example of how unsuccessful the U.S. has been at using tariffs as punitive or coercive instruments of diplomacy. In 1912 the Taft Administration revoked a commercial treaty with czarist Russia to protest the persecution of Jews. A few years later, the pogroms stopped, but not because of U.S. pressure: the Bolsheviks came to power and began repressing the entire population. Washington resumed normal trade when it recognized the U.S.S.R. in 1933, even though Stalin was already cranking...
...create one seem to have only a vague idea of what it would look and feel like. Worse still, their efforts run counter to many traditions inculcated by Russian history; not just the 70 years of communist attempts to create a New Soviet Man, but the centuries of czarist oppression and frequent isolation from outside thought before 1917. Even optimistic experts -- and there are some, both Western and Soviet ! -- think creation of the requisite political culture will take decades, perhaps generations, with innumerable opportunities for backsliding along...
...Almost three centuries of the so-called Tatar Yoke, which ended around 1480, effectively walled off the country from foreign influences, an isolation continued as a matter of policy by the Czars and later the commissars. In the late 16th century, Giles Fletcher the Elder, English ambassador to the czarist court, wrote that Russians were "kept from traveling that they may learn nothing, nor see the fashions of other countries" -- an observation that would still have been accurate a few years ago. Even today a powerful Slavophile movement regards Western ways as incompatible with the Russian character. Some Sovietologists assert...
Another problem is that Soviets lack what Oberlin President Starr terms "horizontal links among citizens," the clubs, professional societies and voluntary associations that in other countries foster the habits of political give-and-take. At the end of the 19th century, Danish historian Georg Brandes called czarist Russia "a bureaucratic state where official power has destroyed all spontaneous and natural growth in the relations of public life." His description would have fit the Communist state even better. Partly in consequence, aspiring leaders have had nowhere to learn the arts of compromise and coalition building indispensable to democratic politics...
...party newspaper Neues Deutschland, recently suffered the humiliation of being rejected for a menial job at the city's waterworks. But he may have been relatively fortunate. Another red Bonze (bigwig) was reportedly seen washing dishes at Berlin's Grand Hotel -- rather like those exiled archdukes from czarist Russia who eked out a living as waiters and doormen in post-1918 Paris...