Word: feudally
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...rock," the old folk saying goes. Three hundred years under the Tatars and 300 years under the Romanovs developed both heroic patience, which erupted into popular revolts, and servile patience, or priterpelost. Russia was the last European country to free its serfs, and plunged into socialism directly from sovereign feudalism, almost completely bypassing the experience of bourgeois democracy. The bedbugs of feudalism and servility moved inside wooden trunks from village huts into communal apartments. Many bosses behaved like "Red feudal lords," taking away not only the peasants' land but their passports too -- and that really smacked of serfdom. Stalin...
Pablo Escobar Gaviria, generally acknowledged to be head of the Mafia, as the cartel is known locally, became something of a local philanthropist, building a zoo, soccer fields and an entire suburb of low-cost houses that is still called Barrio Escobar. In the manner of feudal serfs, residents in Barrio Escobar refer to their benefactor with cap-doffing deference and slip the Spanish honorific Don in front of his name...
Gorbachev's anticorruption drive, moreover, tends to hit hardest in those republics whose quasi-feudal party leadership has traditionally operated on a basis of bribery, kickbacks and influence peddling. Such leaders, in turn, may seek to whip up nationalist resentments against Moscow to protect their own positions...
Thesiger did not return to his birthplace until 1930. Haile Selassie, a friend of his late father's, invited him to attend his coronation. The feudal pageantry of the occasion has been described with condescending vividness by Evelyn Waugh, then a correspondent for Fleet Street. By contrast, Thesiger notes sadly that during his absence of eleven years "the age-old splendour of Abyssinia" had been fading. The Emperor's bodyguard wore khaki; the palace secretaries were in tailcoats. Thesiger met the celebrated author of Vile Bodies and found him foppish and petulant. He refused Waugh's request to accompany...
...into the trees and hunted down one by one. Blood was drawn but no honor satisfied. The participants became public heroes and martyrs, but privately their failure bred resentment, which thrived on blame, which in turn sought enemies within. They were not in short supply, given the tangle of feudal alliances and tribal betrayals that confounded the ideals of nationhood. The wounds of Clonbrony festered and spread violence and discord for decades...