Word: leninization
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Shura, 37, a bearded artist in a faded sheepskin coat, a fur hat tipped to one side of his head. He beckoned toward a darkened doorway before speaking: "Lenin was the only one who thought about us; all the leaders who followed him were ambitious. That is why Brezhnev let us live our own lives; he lived a pretty nice one himself, eh? I have a friend who knows people in the Central Committee. He says that Gorbachev knows what he is about, that he is with it. Say, let's sneak off for a drink. Why huddle here discussing...
Volodya, 30, a small-town schoolteacher in a black jacket and black hat, riding a half-empty bus: "Real change means turning things upside down, and that will never happen. Lenin set the country in motion, and other drivers have stepped in to take his place, but they are all going down the same road and cannot change that. What does it concern the man in the street who is the latest General Secretary? It isn't we who choose them. So why get interested? When I was 20, I was involved in politics. Now I can take...
...what seems an eternal freeze; Chopin thudding in the background; gray-coated soldiers marching stiff legged like a row of A's; a body laid out like a doll atop a hill of red and white flowers. Familiar sites: the House of Unions, the Historical Museum, the Lenin Mausoleum. Familiar rituals: foreign dignitaries solemnly shaking hands with the new man, giving him the once-over. There is the former leader's widow, the first chance for a closer look at her. What codes can be deciphered in the eulogy? Which Politburo member is standing where? These funerals have been...
...useful on such occasions to pick up John Reed's enthusiastic description of Lenin in Ten Days That Shook the World: "Loved and revered as perhaps few leaders in history have been . . . a leader purely by virtue of intellect; colorless, humorless, uncompromising and detached, without picturesque idiosyncrasies--but with the power of explaining profound ideas in simple terms." Then, having read that, to pick up Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography, Speak, Memory, in which the author, having fled the Soviet revolution, discusses the "bestial terror that had been sanctioned by Lenin --the torture- house, the blood-bespattered wall." Reed saw what...
...theory, the conceptual breakthrough has been restricted to the economy; in practice, it has begun to affect other areas of national life. Not just Marx but Lenin and Stalin too, China's dialecticians are now saying, could not possibly have foreseen today's global and national realities. Their theories, it is argued, should thus no longer be treated as sacred truth...