Word: leninism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, founder of the one-party Soviet dictatorship, believed that anyone who disagreed with him was an enemy who had to be ruthlessly smashed. He would not have hesitated a moment before arresting the members of the Congress of People's Deputies who decided last week to form a legal opposition calling itself the Interregional Group. At a freewheeling conference in Moscow's House of Cinema, the new faction elected a collective leadership and adopted a platform that called for rewriting the Soviet Constitution to make the system safe for pluralism and basic civil rights. In a direct...
Such a profound alteration of the very foundations of the Soviet system would have been unthinkable even a year ago. But many Soviet citizens are thinking the unthinkable these days. During his years of exile and his reign over the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1924, Lenin formulated prescriptions for every aspect of the nation's political, economic and social conduct. Now even he, like so much else in this changing land, is being questioned...
...Interregional Group is staking out a program that would create something akin to social democracy. Perhaps most daring, it proposes eliminating Article VI of the Constitution, which entrenches the Communist Party as the "leading and guiding force" in all aspects of the society. Dumping this provision would effectively reverse Lenin's totalitarian doctrine that the party must control the state...
American experts find such revisionism a dramatic development. With establishment journals publishing criticism of Lenin, says Dimitri Simes of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, "nothing about Communism is sacred any longer in the Soviet Union." Robert Legvold, director of Columbia University's Harriman Institute, does not expect Lenin to go from icon to archvillain. "Lenin will be given an honorary place in Soviet history as the founder of the country," says he. "Yet, just as U.S. historians can show the warts of George Washington, Soviet historians will be able to do the same with Lenin...
...demythifying process, argues Nina Tumarkin, professor of history at Wellesley College and author of The Cult of Lenin, is necessary if the Soviet Union is to right itself. "Lenin is being brought down to earth to make way for the new myths of perestroika," she says. If Gorbachev's political reform is more than a myth and the government is able to find its legitimacy in increased democracy, it might not need Lenin anymore...