Word: leninism
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...mother carrying a swaddled child paces despondently, then wheels and, in the accents of old Russia, jeers at the leaders of the new Soviet state: "Liars! Killers! You don't know Christ!" The time is the last day of 1917, and the central object of her rage is V.I. Lenin. His revolution has succeeded, but his nation's economy is failing, its armies are in retreat, its enemies are demanding territory, and its ideology has failed to take hold anywhere beyond the borders of traditional Russia...
That opening confrontation is not only dramatic but also, by erstwhile Soviet standards, outright dangerous. It portrays Lenin as a fallible man, not a mythic hero. It admits that the Bolsheviks were detested by many of the peasants they purported to help. And the play commits the once unpardonable sin of bringing Trotsky onstage -- showing him, in fact, as shrewder than Lenin. The theme is ideological purity vs. practical necessity, with pragmatism favored all the way. Compromise with the West is extolled as sensible; worldwide revolution is dismissed as a daydream...
...Mikhail Gorbachev attended the premiere; afterward he endorsed the play and embraced its leading actor, his friend Mikhail Ulyanov. One version has Gorbachev saying, "That is me. That is me." Playwright Mikhail Shatrov, 58, says that the actual words were more restrained but that Gorbachev openly drew parallels between Lenin's reluctant peace with imperial Germany and his own reform and retrenchment. Thus the staging of Shatrov's text became a political as well as an artistic event, a landmark of changing times. And of countless cultural exchanges between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. in recent years, none...
...their economies after 40 years of Communist rule, schools will have to vie with industry and agriculture for scarce resources. But for the moment at least, teachers and pupils seem thrilled by their new freedom to think, speak and seek the truth now that the ghosts of Marx and Lenin have been expelled from the classroom...
EDUCATION: Life without Marx and Lenin...