Word: dictatorship
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...people's overthrow of President Nicolae Ceausescu's paranoid dictatorship last week seemed to take ten hours. On Thursday night the megalomaniacal leader and his wife Elena were ensconced in the presidential palace in Bucharest; by Friday morning, they were gone. But unlike the bloodless revolutions in the rest of the Warsaw Pact countries, the Rumanian convulsion was soaked in blood. The number of casualties is still not known, but if the estimates of thousands killed turn out to be correct, Ceausescu's name will be indelibly linked to one of the largest government-inflicted massacres since World...
...wrath. Without the backing of the Soviet army, local satraps dared not use their security forces and probably did not know if they could trust them. The communist parties tried to buy off the people with leadership shuffles and semireforms, but that was not the point. Communist dictatorship could not be reformed; it could only be destroyed...
...year is 1992. Gorbachev has been overthrown, and the Soviet empire has fallen apart. The Russian heartland is ruled by an ultra-nationalist military dictatorship, the Baltic republics by Catholic radicals, and Central Asia by fundamentalist emirates. Tanks patrol the streets of Moscow, and throughout the country a fearful, starving populace wreaks revenge on former Communist Party members, Jews and intellectuals...
...things in Central Europe or the Soviet Union go wrong, which they could, I don't think we'll see a return to an assertive, confident, Stalinist renewal. Instead, we'll probably see a turn toward some highly nationalistic form of dictatorship, perhaps what I call a "Holy Alliance" between the Soviet Army and the Russian Orthodox Church, galvanized by a sense of desperate Great Russian nationalism. That would then produce even more intense reactions from non-Russians. It could be a very ugly picture...
...some new form of associated statehood for the Baltic republics. Georgia and some of the other more nationally defined republics could enjoy a much more independent status within the Soviet confederation. If they don't have that, then they will have to have some form of Great Russian nationalist dictatorship. I think Gorbachev is trying to persuade the non-Russian nations that they have to accept some form of yet undefined pluralism as the only alternative...