Word: de
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When Mikhail Gorbachev instituted his policy of glasnost in the late 1980s, the Communist Party tried to practice a policy of regulated criticism. The goal was to "de-Stalinize" the Soviet Union, to resume Khrushchev's liberalization in the late 1950s. But eventually, glasnost led to the image of Lenin, not least with the publication of Vassily Grossman's Forever Flowing, a novel that dared compare Lenin's cruelty to Hitler's. While he was in office, Gorbachev always called himself a "confirmed Leninist"; it was only years later when he too--the last General Secretary of the Communist Party...
...birth, upbringing and style, he believed in and fought for plain people--for the "forgotten man" (and woman), for the "third of the nation, ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." He was loved because he radiated personal charm, joy in his work, optimism for the future. Even Charles de Gaulle, who well knew Roosevelt's disdain for him, succumbed to the "glittering personality," as he put it, of "that artist, that seducer." "Meeting him," said Winston Churchill, "was like uncorking a bottle of champagne...
...kingdom collapsed after 12 years in a war that remains the most atrocious, the most brutal and the deadliest in history. But which, by the same token, allowed several large figures to emerge. Their names have become legendary: Eisenhower, De Gaulle, Montgomery, Zhukov, Patton...
...Slipping across the Chinese frontier into Vietnam--his first return home in three decades--he urged his disciples to fight both the Japanese and the French. There, in a remote camp, he founded the Viet Minh, an acronym for the Vietnam Independence League, from which he derived his nom de guerre, Ho Chi Minh--roughly "Bringer of Light...
...approach. And after painstaking preliminaries, the most famous prisoner in the world was escorted, in the greatest secrecy, to the State President's office to start negotiating not only his own release but also the nation's transition from apartheid to democracy. On Feb. 2, 1990, President F.W. de Klerk lifted the ban on the A.N.C. and announced Mandela's imminent release...