Word: leninism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...bookstacks, he had read Bakunin, who dreamed of absolute freedom; Marx, who dreamed of absolute politico-economic science; and Rousseau, who dreamed of justice. More important, he had read the Prussian General Karl von Clausewitz, who dreamed of power. The more Lenin schemed and struggled (in the bookstacks) for the revolution, and was thwarted, the more he thought of power. He made marginal notes on Clausewitz. "How true!" Lenin wrote. "Clever and witty." Admiringly, he summed up a Clausewitzian point: "War as a part of a whole, and that whole-politics...
...February 1917, the Russian people, without any help from Lenin, made a revolution that overthrew the Czar, freed political prisoners, speech and press, and organized the first and last free election in Russia's history. The Russians knew what they wanted, but Lenin knew better. A Lenin dictum was: "The people themselves do not know what is good or bad for them...
...Worry of the Future." Lenin organized not a people's but a plotter's revolution. One night, eight months after the February revolution, his men seized the key points in Petrograd. They grabbed the telegraph office in order to "telegraph the revolution to the provinces." Soon afterwards, a Lettish regiment (controlled by the Bolshevik Party) and the sailors of Kronstadt dispersed the freely elected Constituent Assembly in which his Bolsheviks had only a 26% minority...
...over the world, millions of people (including some who were rather disappointed in his successor Stalin) came to revere Lenin as an idealist who believed in freedom and justice for the common man. Perhaps he did. He also believed in black neckties with little white flowers, and almost always wore them. Both these beliefs were irrelevant to what Lenin really stood for. He stood for the use, by any means, of power over people...
Champagne & Sausage?. In Moscow slogans fluttered everywhere. Cloth that might have shielded shabby workers from the biting winter was daubed with likenesses of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and minor Soviet gods, and hung on buildings. Materials and labor skills which could have made houses everyone needed were used to construct gay, quaint booths for tea street fairs, where felt-booted citizens who tired of street dancing in the light November slush could buy (at fantastic prices) champagne, vodka, soda pop, bread and sausage. Truck-borne roving players mimed and capered on eleven bunting-draped stages in public squares. Fifty-three bands...