Word: dictatorships
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...Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days - a title whose meaning becomes clear only about halfway through the film - is Christian Mungiu's startlingly good drama set in 1987, during the end of Romania's Ceausescu regime. The burdens of Soviet-style dictatorship have imposed a gray pall on the country, putting most of the citizenry in a perpetually sour mood. The black market, for shampoo and Kent cigarettes, is on each street corner, in every college dormitory. That's where we meet Otilia (Annamaria Marinca), a smart, illusionless student, and her pretty, mopey roommate Gabita (Laura Vasiliu). Gabita is despondent...
...desperate combat, which cost the lives of some 27 million Soviet citizens. Historians still argue why the first months of war proved so disastrous to Soviet forces and how they recovered to strike back. The answer is that not many were all that eager to fight for the Stalin dictatorship, as the Germans invaded. But the horror and terror of Nazism, unleashed on the conquered territories, forced the people to fight back for survival and turned the conflict into the Great Patriotic War, Stalin...
...hawkish Alem?n, who speaks wistfully of the repressive days of the Somoza dictatorship (which Ortega overthrew as leader of the Sandinista insurgents), was never a typical prisoner. He has spent more of his jail sentence in a hospital bed recovering from a minor finger surgery (three months to be exact) than he spent behind bars. And now that full freedom appears to be just around the corner, he has valiantly cast aside concerns for his own health for the good of his party...
...then the recently elected President of Russia, seized the moment. He strode outside, leapt atop an armored vehicle and delivered a speech in the fiery tradition of the old Bolsheviks whose communist heritage he was at that moment dismantling. "Soldiers, officers, generals," he boomed. "The clouds of terror and dictatorship are gathering over the whole country. They must not be allowed to bring eternal night...
...members, various versions circulated in samizdat as well as the Western press. According to one report Yeltsin had voiced widely held popular grievances about ordinary Russians' standard of living. "Comrades," he began, "I find it hard to explain to a worker why, in the 70th year of the dictatorship of the proletariat, he still has to stand in line for sausage that has more starch than meat...