Word: lenin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...messianism with Hegelian and Marxian determinism, the idea that vast and blind historical forces sweep across the world's stage without important regard to personalities. But of course that Marxist thought is invalidated by Marxist his tory ? the crucial "heroic" role played by men like Marx himself, and Lenin and Stalin. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. suggests that "men have lived who did what no substitute could ever have done; their intervention set history on one path rather than another. If this is so, the old maxim There are no indispensable men' would seem another amiable fallacy. There is, then...
JAMES GAVIN, U.S. lieutenant general (ret.): Among leaders who have made the greatest impact through the ages, I would consider Mohammed, Jesus Christ, maybe Lenin, possibly Mao. As for a leader whose qualities we could most use now, I would choose John F. Kennedy...
...impact, then you would have to name Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius, the great prophets of the world. Among political leaders, Alexander may have been the greatest. He brought the Greek and Oriental civilizations together, and it's hard to conceive of this happening without his personal intervention. Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, who set the terms for political discussion. But both pale before two 19th century intellectual giants, Sigmund Freud and Lenin's own mentor, Karl Marx, the secular prophets of our time...
...SNOW, British author: I don't believe much in great leaders. Great leaders emerge from circumstances and normally don't create them. Very occasionally one or two produce a difference. If Lenin had not existed, it is hard to see how the Russian Revolution could have succeeded. Further back, Augustus Caesar brought order out of chaos and created the imperial peace...
That night he and Henry Kissinger and General Alexander Haig, his staff chief, strolled through the Kremlin grounds talking softly in the dark with no worry of intrusion from photographers or constituents. The three men walked by the apartment where Lenin had lived when he came to the Kremlin to direct the revolution and formation of a government. They went by the modern auditorium built beneath the ancient church spires with gilded onion domes. Nixon noted how old and new were fitted together behind the Kremlin walls. He paused a moment In the discussion to take another look...