Word: dictatorship
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Inflation runs riot, sapping an already weakened economy; people go cold and hungry. A weak democratic government fails to maintain order, and is vilified by nationalists furious at the country's fall from world power to beggary. An attempted coup designed to install a dictatorship collapses, and its leaders are tried for treason. But after a final economic breakdown marked by mass unemployment, fascists come to power with wide popular support and institute a ruthless totalitarianism...
Some experts fear trouble in Russia and other Soviet republics even this winter, if food shortages deepen into famine and provoke riots. "Perhaps the threat of dictatorship has been removed for the time being, but the danger persists," says former Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, who accurately foretold the failed August coup attempt by old-line communists. "I am afraid of uncontrolled, spontaneous ((crowd)) movements," he adds. "The people are tired, and food is lacking...
...visit the Soviet Union, "telling us it was a workers' paradise. Today," he acknowledges, "that would make people laugh." Outside city hall, activist Gerard Kourland is selling L'Humanite, the party organ, and patiently explaining the difference between the Russian and French parties: "We officially gave up on the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1976. And even before then, we had our doubts...
...breath. The failed coup and the turmoil that has followed are fundamentally enormously hopeful events. If the immediate results are chaotic -- well, revolutions by their nature cannot be tidy. The trouble is that the most democratic revolutions can so easily degenerate into lasting chaos, out of which a new dictatorship can be born. Remember the February 1917 revolution that overthrew the Czar, the chaos that followed, and the November 1917 Bolshevik coup, which established the tyranny that has only now been broken -- maybe...
...must be taught some socializing lesson by the end of the half hour (and who will forget it before next week's show). Hurt and Fox must be purged of their aggressiveness, their flippancy, their maleness. Kings in their operating room, they must become serfs in the benign dictatorship of Nice. If this emotional brainwashing is redemption, then give us hell. These movies are hot-air balloons that deserve to be punctured -- preferably with a Black & Decker power drill...