Word: leninism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Mikhail Gorbachev. The name, the beaming, birthmarked visage and the outstretched, crowd-caressing hand have become so familiar in the past 33 months that it is difficult to remember the man's predecessors.Vague images come to mind of stone-faced figures frozen in mid-frown atop the Lenin Mausoleum. Gargoyles in fur hats. Perhaps Gorbachev's most obvious accomplishment is that he has reinvented the idea of a Soviet leader. Virtually everything about his country and its place in world affairs seems less ponderous, less opaque than it did before he became General Secretary of the Communist Party...
...would have recognized; he promotes freer discussion within the Communist Party only as a substitute for the political opposition he makes clear he will not tolerate. If he voices criticism of Soviet society, it is because that system has in his view strayed from the ideals of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state and Gorbachev's idol. And though he argues frequently for a new relationship with the U.S., he seems to have an odd conception of America as a Dickensian hell ruled by the military-industrial complex...
...seems sincere when he talks about his desire for peace. But you must always remember that their spokesmen back in the time of Lenin, and maybe even Lenin himself, did not want war either. They believed that they would win without...
...with righteousness. The store of imperial riches has only increased with time. The Kremlin and Its Treasures (Rizzoli; 356 pages; $75) is a gilded album of Russian history recalled through the voluptuous chambers of the czars, the rococo throne of Catherine I and the spare, careful quarters of the Lenin family...
Gorbachev cited other historical "nonpersons." Leon Trotsky, an ally of Lenin's who was exiled by Stalin and assassinated by a Soviet agent in 1940, received a brief mention -- but only as a power-hungry schemer "who always vacillated and cheated." More fortunate was Nikolai Bukharin, another close Lenin aide who ran afoul of Stalin and was executed as a spy in 1938. Gorbachev credited Bukharin, who supported Lenin's free market-oriented New Economic Policy and opposed forced collectivization, with helping to frustrate Trotsky's ambitions. Yet Gorbachev felt compelled to cite Lenin's reservations about Bukharin's ideological...