Word: czars
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...bronze equestrian statue of Czar Alexander II dominates the cobblestone square in front of the parliament building in Sofia. It was erected by grateful Bulgarians to commemorate Russian victories in 1877 and 1878 that ended five centuries of Turkish rule over the Slavic nation. Since the resignation of Stalinist dictator Todor Zhivkov last November, that statue has become the rallying point for a revived nationalist movement using the old hatred of the Turks to fight new political battles. Day after day, thousands of Bulgarians ignored sub-zero temperatures to gather around it. They shook their fists and cheered rabble-rousing...
...ashen face of the dictator, eyes open, blood oozing from his head, leaped almost instantly onto TV screens in Rumania and around the world. Many Rumanians wept or cheered in relief. Soviet viewers saw parallels with the Bolshevik Revolution and the execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family. In Paris editorial writers recalled the French Revolution and suggested it was 1789 in Rumania -- with some of the same ambiguities of that upheaval...
...over time, fewer and fewer Russians fit the stereotype of illiterate peasants on whose bovine passivity Czar or commissar could rely. Soviets were increasingly well educated and well informed, in spite of the propaganda poured over them. And while they reached political maturity, their leadership sank into senility. The people cringed when they heard the doddering Leonid Brezhnev try to form his words and when they learned that his hands were so shaky he had to eat with a spoon at a state dinner. They told scornful jokes: state radio, cynics said, dared not play any work by Tchaikovsky...
Gorbachev has been badgering and cajoling ordinary citizens to take charge of their own futures in their jobs and in political organizations. He told Moscow editors in September 1988 that he wanted to "rid public opinion of such a harmful complex as faith in the 'good Czar,' the all-powerful center, the notion that someone can bring about order and organize perestroika from on high." His revamping of the legislative organs of the government offered just such an opportunity to assault the old conveyor-belt way of doing things...