Word: marxist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Polish leaders getting all excited? The people are only following the Marxist motto "Workers of the world unite...
Historian James Billington in his recent book, Fire in the Minds of Men, has noted that Vladimir Lenin was "a professional revolutionary before he became a Marxist." Lenin embraced Marxism because it was a very potent ideology for the purposes he had in mind. In fact, even as he played fast and loose with the letter of Marxism, Lenin was, in a way, being true to its spirit. "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways," wrote Marx, "the point is, to change it." As Lenin set out to alter the world, he found in Marx's philosophy...
Lenin regarded all that as foolish, but not terribly inconvenient. He paid a certain amount of lip service to the Marxist prophecy, while in his policies he set about battening down the here and now of socialism and deferring forever the promised millennium of true Communism. The last thing he wanted, or would tolerate, was any move that would cause the state to wither or that would mitigate the dictatorship of the Communist Party...
...culminations under Joseph Stalin. He converted the party into a reflection of his personal will, made the secret police a state within the state, and during World War II became the first political leader to award himself the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union. Carrying the logic of Marxist-Leninist vigilance and militancy to grotesque extremes, Stalin presided over the extermination of at least 20 million "class enemies," "enemies of the state," "enemies of the people" and "traitors...
...direct military intervention to ensure the survival of the Soviet system, including in those countries where the system has been imposed by outright conquest-such as Hungary, Czechoslovakia and, possibly next, Poland. On Christmas Day two years ago, the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan to prop up a faltering Marxist regime and has been there ever since...