Word: lenin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin must be turning over in his mausoleum. He was never one for personality cults, but to strip his name from the city that gave birth to the communist revolution is the ultimate repudiation of what he stood for. That is precisely what the residents of Leningrad resolved to do last week. According to preliminary results of a referendum organized by the reformist city council, 55% voted to restore the town's old name of St. Petersburg...
...West, intending to yank his fusty country toward the future. When the Russians went to war against Germany in 1914, the city's Teutonic appellation suddenly became politically incorrect. Emperor Nicholas II's solution was to Russify the name, making it Petrograd. So it remained until 1924, when Lenin died, prompting the Bolshevik government to rechristen the city in his honor. It was there, after all, that worker revolts paved the way for the communist uprising...
...Mikhail Gorbachev panhandles the U.S. and McDonald's draws longer lines in Moscow than Lenin's tomb, it is difficult to believe that less than three decades ago, Washington and Moscow were on the steely edge of war. The drama and tension of those years are vividly recaptured in Michael Beschloss's The Crisis Years. But this is no simple rehash of John Kennedy's sparring with Nikita Khrushchev. Beschloss casts new light on topics ranging from the Cuban missile crisis to the security risks of J.F.K.'s sexual dalliances...
...Mengistu, whose brutal 14-year dictatorship -- the last hard-line Marxist-Leninist regime in Africa -- had turned his nation of 51 million people into a wasteland of famine and internecine fighting. In the streets, hundreds celebrated the tyrant's departure, cheering as workmen dismantled a huge bronze statue of Lenin in one of the capital's main squares. The Israeli government took advantage of the confusion to launch a massive airlift of some 14,000 Ethiopian Jews who had fearfully gathered near the Israeli embassy (10,000 had been rescued during a famine in 1984). Using giant C-130 transport...
...policy. The nation needs enormous sums of Western aid to overhaul its collapsing economy. But it has no chance if it maintains a society largely walled off from the outside world. So Moscow is maneuvering to open the country to foreign influence in ways that might make not only Lenin and Stalin but also some of the czars spin in their graves...