Word: leninism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Understanding the challenges that will arise from the fracturing of the Soviet bloc will help the U.S. avoid the unseemly tendency to gloat. But it should not obscure the epochal nature of the change occurring. Poland and Hungary are abandoning the basic tenets that Lenin distorted after Marx and that Stalin distorted after Lenin: a rigidly centralized economy, a one-party political system and a suppression of personal freedoms. People are electing their representatives for the first time. They are reading independent newspapers and starting their own businesses. They are even tearing down the fences that have kept the world...
...could such a monster gain absolute ascendancy over the Soviet Union? In this book Medvedev backs away from his earlier position that Stalinism was essentially an aberration on the road to a more benevolent Communism envisioned by Lenin. The historian has re-examined the totalitarian system created by Lenin and now suspects that Stalinism sprang from Leninism, as many American Sovietologists have concluded. Though Medvedev never fully confronts this issue, he emphatically makes one crucial point: when Lenin banned all opposition groups and factions in 1921, the ensuing one-party dictatorship was "a very important condition for Stalin's usurpation...
...fomented social unrest in the name of class struggle. A family portrait shows Wuer, age 1, holding up a copy of Mao's Little Red Book. Throughout the rigors of the period, his father remained a loyal member of the party who spent years translating the works of Marx, Lenin and Mao from Chinese into Uighur. When thousands of China's intellectuals were forced out of the cities to work as peasants in the countryside, Wuer's father went willingly. The strain and exposure left his legs paralyzed for years afterward, but he neither complained nor criticized the party...
From the opening moment, when the spotlights flicked on to illuminate a towering statue of Lenin, it was clear that the days of fully scripted, party- orchestrated politics had -- at least for a moment -- come to an end. Assembled in the Kremlin's Palace of Congresses were the delegates to the Soviet Union's brand-new Congress of People's Deputies, a forum where doctrine could be questioned, where the unexpected could happen, and where the unmentionable could be spoken for all the nation to hear...
...good, that it is their responsibility to keep local authorities in line. Only that sociological change will make possible the economic and political reforms that Gorbachev, Deng and other reformers insist are necessary. Thus far, no Communist regime has found a way out of this dilemma. Lenin once said, "Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted." His political heirs are finding that it is a difficult task indeed...