Word: dictatorship
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, founder of the one-party Soviet dictatorship, believed that anyone who disagreed with him was an enemy who had to be ruthlessly smashed. He would not have hesitated a moment before arresting the members of the Congress of People's Deputies who decided last week to form a legal opposition calling itself the Interregional Group. At a freewheeling conference in Moscow's House of Cinema, the new faction elected a collective leadership and adopted a platform that called for rewriting the Soviet Constitution to make the system safe for pluralism and basic civil rights. In a direct...
Nicaragua has a precise way of marking time, like a.m. and p.m. or B.C. and A.D. Everything that happened during the 43 years prior to July 1979 took place "during the dictatorship"; everything afterward is "since the triumph of the revolution." Ten years ago this month, a victorious band of guerrillas who called themselves Sandinistas, embraced a unique brand of tropical Marxism, and promised to educate, heal and enfranchise the poor triumphed over the corrupt rule of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the inheritor of a family dynasty begun in 1936. The Sandinistas had ridden to power on an armed uprising, aided...
...year-old Esperanza Lopez that her children would flourish. But her job as a maid in Chinandega pays only about $10 a month, to support three young ones. Says she: "I can only feed them once a day. Maybe it's true that we earned less under the dictatorship, but you could buy more with...
...because the inability to relinquish the past can produce such horror that memory -- what place, what price, what power to give it -- is a central question in the great historical transition from dictatorship to democracy. All the new Latin democracies, for example, are emerging from periods of brutal dictatorship. What to do with this past? Uruguay chose, by referendum, a forgetting. It voted to let the brutalities of military rule be bygone. Argentina did the opposite. It prosecuted those who gave the orders for torture and execution. The Argentine experience, however, with its semiannual military revolts and its reversion...
...examined the totalitarian system created by Lenin and now suspects that Stalinism sprang from Leninism, as many American Sovietologists have concluded. Though Medvedev never fully confronts this issue, he emphatically makes one crucial point: when Lenin banned all opposition groups and factions in 1921, the ensuing one-party dictatorship was "a very important condition for Stalin's usurpation of power." Addressing the readers he ultimately hopes to reach, the Soviet people, he warns that "if socialism is not combined with democracy, it can become a breeding ground for new crimes...