Word: medvedev
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...tried to dampen the ardor for repealing Article 6, claiming that giving up one-party rule would be a capitulation. But there were signs last week that the Kremlin was willing to fiddle with the text. Noting that Article 6 was "not a taboo subject," Politburo ideologist Vadim Medvedev said the present wording should not be kept "at all cost" and ought to be "brought into line with the party's new role in society...
Last week Starkov was summoned to the Central Committee office of Vadim Medvedev, the party's chief ideologist, and urged to resign. Normally such an invitation, which unquestionably reflects the wishes of Gorbachev, would be an irrefusable offer. But Starkov so far remains in his job. "Everything here is normal," he said late last week. "I put my signature on this week's edition, and I plan to sign the next one too. Mistakes sometimes happen." Starkov retains the support of his staff, some of whom have threatened to go out on strike, while worried readers have been pestering phone...
...could such a monster gain absolute ascendancy over the Soviet Union? In this book Medvedev backs away from his earlier position that Stalinism was essentially an aberration on the road to a more benevolent Communism envisioned by Lenin. The historian has re-examined the totalitarian system created by Lenin and now suspects that Stalinism sprang from Leninism, as many American Sovietologists have concluded. Though Medvedev never fully confronts this issue, he emphatically makes one crucial point: when Lenin banned all opposition groups and factions in 1921, the ensuing one-party dictatorship was "a very important condition for Stalin's usurpation...
...Medvedev's assertions point straight to Gorbachev's fundamental problem: how to realize the "democratization" he has proclaimed within the totalitarian institutions of the one-party Soviet state. Unfortunately, it is not in the power of even so perspicacious a historian as Medvedev to resolve that fateful dilemma. Perhaps that is why he has become, at 63, a fledgling parliamentarian...
...words added by Roy Medvedev to his Let History Judge, first published in the West in 1971, deepen a portrait of a monster...