Word: lenin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Despite the burden of such a legacy, Russia is changing faster and in more ways than at any time in its history. Instead of the fiery prophet Lenin, the obsessed and brutal Stalin or the bub bly and unpredictable Khrushchev, it is led today by an oligarchy of sober, cautious bureaucrats who embody the country's new striving for respectability. Under the aegis of Premier Aleksei Nikolaevich Kosygin, 63, whose hound-dog countenance is better known in the West than the two or three others with whom he shares power, the government is experimenting with economic liberalization and cautiously...
Like a giant moth attempting to break out of a cocoon, Soviet Communism is trying to rid itself of a doctrine conceived a century ago in a far different world. Though Lenin had to revise Marx to fit the Russian pattern, it was Nikita Khrushchev who launched the official decline of the doctrine. Faced with the necessity of solving countless economic and social problems, today's Soviet planners find such Marxist theories as class revolution and "the dictatorship of the proletariat" just plain nuisances. The Chinese are right, of course: the Russians are revisionists. In a very real sense...
...view of history. By its achievement, it seems to have given them more self-esteem and pride in their country than the mass of Russians have ever had before. Gone is the obsequious muzhik whose manners were formed by centuries of serfdom. No longer pervasive is the type that Lenin belittled as "the exhausted, hysterical, misery-mongering intellectual who, publicly beating his breast, cries: 'I am bad, I am vile...
Despite the recent relaxation, life in the Soviet Union has a boring and sometimes even a brutish quality. Outside his home, the Russian cannot walk, sit clown or breathe without seeing a slogan, a flag, a statistic, a portrait of Lenin, a piece of heroic Soviet statuary. He is rarely allowed to tour outside the Soviet Union by himself, even in other socialist countries, and he must show an internal passport when he travels within his own country. A Russian spends much of his free time standing in queues, where he must push and heave to defend his place. Partly...
...Even a cook can rule a state," Lenin once proclaimed in his dogmatic fashion. Today, Russia is ruled by committee rather than by a single man-and thus is afflicted with too many cooks in the kitchen. They are an elite of highly trained and sophisticated technical managers, who call themselves a kollektivnost rukovodstva, (collectivity of leadership). Though they continue to follow the general policies set down by Khrushchev, they have replaced the lush disorder and impulsiveness of his personalized government with more deliberate, rational procedures. They move only after elaborate consultations, try to be not only secretive but faceless...