Word: leninization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
JAMES GAVIN, U.S. lieutenant general (ret.): Among leaders who have made the greatest impact through the ages, I would consider Mohammed, Jesus Christ, maybe Lenin, possibly Mao. As for a leader whose qualities we could most use now, I would choose John F. Kennedy...
...impact, then you would have to name Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius, the great prophets of the world. Among political leaders, Alexander may have been the greatest. He brought the Greek and Oriental civilizations together, and it's hard to conceive of this happening without his personal intervention. Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, who set the terms for political discussion. But both pale before two 19th century intellectual giants, Sigmund Freud and Lenin's own mentor, Karl Marx, the secular prophets of our time...
...SNOW, British author: I don't believe much in great leaders. Great leaders emerge from circumstances and normally don't create them. Very occasionally one or two produce a difference. If Lenin had not existed, it is hard to see how the Russian Revolution could have succeeded. Further back, Augustus Caesar brought order out of chaos and created the imperial peace...
...Gulag Archipelago was written expressly for Soviet readers. Again and again the author says, in effect: We thought the Moscow purges of 1937 were more or less isolated convulsions of terror. Not so. The corruption of Soviet justice did not begin with Stalin as we were taught, but with Lenin, in 1918. Then he goes back to document the successive waves of political prisoners-from engineer "wreckers" of the Revolution and peasants caught up in collectivization right down to whole divisions of Red Army soldiers captured by the Germans in World War II and then returned to the U.S.S.R...
What kind of shock such a book must be for the Russians who manage to read it is difficult to imagine. For some, Stalin is still a hero. To most, Lenin is close to a political saint. Westerners -courtesy of cold war propaganda, a free press and honest scholarship-regard both men with varying degrees of repugnance. Even to them, much of the cruelty and stupidity will seem dreadful enough. Solzhenitsyn produces moments that are unbearable, breaking through all defenses that the mid-20th century reader is likely to have raised against being afflicted by the pain of others...