Word: leonide
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...departing Old Guard, dubbed the "dead souls" in a reference to Nikolai Gogol's 19th century novel, read like a Who's Who from the time of Leonid Brezhnev. Included were a former President, a former Prime Minister, five marshals, six generals and a portfolio of onetime Politburo members. What's more, they had "requested" to resign in an extraordinary statement that expressed "unanimous support for the political course of our dear party." As Gorbachev explained to the plenum, "One generation of party members has naturally to replace another...
Party lines, like glaciers, do move. But for Soviet artists, glasnost seems more like a whirlpool of possibilities, most of them still anxiously hypothetical. The artists have had to learn not to be optimists. Fifteen years ago, Leonid Brezhnev's officials sent plainclothes militia and bulldozers to break up and bury an outdoor show of unofficial art in Sokolniki, a park on the outskirts of Moscow. This goons' picnic would not be repeated today. The socialist realist line, imposed by Stalin after 1929 and kept to the end of Brezhnev's reign, held that a work of art should fulfill...
Rewriting history has long been a tradition among Soviet leaders. Stalin revised a history of the Communist Party to puff up his role in the Bolshevik Revolution. Nikita Khrushchev began the deflation of Stalin; Leonid Brezhnev converted Khrushchev into a nonperson; Gorbachev in turn has depreciated Brezhnev, causing his name to be removed from factories, cities and streets. As the joke goes, the Soviet Union is the only country in the world with an unpredictable past...
...Gorbachev is wondering how Soviet history will judge him, he will do well to remember that the country's leaders tend to die twice: once in body and soul, and later in public opinion. While Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev were accorded elaborate state funerals, their reputations since then have changed quite markedly. Stalin is viewed negatively by 62% and positively by only 7%, though that rating is almost double among people who see perestroika as a deviation from Marxism-Leninism...
...about to recognize the success of any American doctrine, they do admit, at least tacitly, the failure of any number of doctrines from their own Communist past: Karl Marx's world revolution, Vladimir Lenin's "proletarian internationalism," Nikita Khrushchev's sponsorship of "wars of national liberation" and Leonid Brezhnev's assertion of the right to use force to protect the "gains" of socialism. In an interview with TIME, Anatoli Gromyko, director of Moscow's Institute of African Studies admits, "We should not export revolution. The idea that a socialist revolution would spread around the world was a romantic view...