Word: lenin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Parliamentary Deputies had assembled last week to hear the contents of the revolution-red binder in Gorbachev's hands: nothing less than a plan to make over the system bequeathed by Lenin, salvage a once proud country from chaos and lead it to the semblance of a Western-style market economy. Even before Gorbachev began to speak, however, his proposal had become a lightning rod for protest from radical reformers. In a week in which the Soviet President had won the Nobel Peace Prize for changing the world, he was fated to be awarded criticism at home for not worrying...
...Lenin...
...founder of the Soviet state wrote those words in 1922, but they were only made public last April -- at a time when Lenin's heirs were finally giving up their long antireligion battle. Perhaps the most startling evidence of the change was the celebration of the first Eucharist since 1918 in the Kremlin's Cathedral of the Assumption, barely three weeks ago. While Anatoli Lukyanov, the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, and Ivan Silayev, prime minister of the Russian republic, and other Communist dignitaries looked on, Alexi II, Patriarch of All Russia, conducted services in the formerly pre-eminent church...
...became official. Culminating a two-year thaw, the Soviet parliament passed a new Law on Freedom of Conscience by a vote of 341 to 2. The statute bestowed great opportunities on believers, estimated to number as many as 131 million, who have maintained their faith despite the oppression of Lenin and his successors. But with freedom come some grievous problems, principally shortages of money, trained clergy and just about everything else needed for religious restoration. At the same time, ugly sectarian conflicts, also long repressed, are boiling up within and among religious factions...
...decades, religion was anathema to all good Soviets. Did not Marx teach that it was the "opium of the people"? Lenin himself wrote that the Russian Orthodox Church had to be suppressed, its treasure confiscated. But last week the hold of the atheistic Communist Party loosened a bit more as the state strengthened religious freedoms. With the Orthodox Patriarch, Alexei II, and other religious leaders watching, the Supreme Soviet, by a vote of 341 to 1, gave preliminary approval to a law that forbids the government to restrict "the study, financing or propagandizing" of religion...