Word: peasant
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Rather than chronicling last spring's events, Lord concentrates on coming to terms with legacies from the past: her family's and China's. In her uncle Jieu Jieu, the wise peasant who boasts an "unwashable brain," Lord sees the best aspects of the masses in whose name the Chinese revolution was waged. Supremely pragmatic, Jieu Jieu never bought Chairman Mao's line that the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s would instantly catapult China into the ranks of industrialized countries. On the other hand, Lord broods over the dilemma of an elderly scholar whose Western education made...
Mozambique. President Joaquim Chissano is showing much more pragmatism than Mengistu. Last summer Chissano's government abandoned the Marxist-Leninist credo that his Frelimo Party has embraced since it came to power in 1975. Transformed from "a vanguard of the worker and peasant alliance" to "a party of all the Mozambican people," the ruling group has stepped up market reforms that it initiated in the mid-1980s. Last January Chissano introduced a draft constitution that embraces universal suffrage, a secret ballot, direct election of both the President and the parliament and the reintroduction of private ownership of land...
...walk back toward Putovskova Square and talk with a middle-age peasant. "I have six children, and I support my two parents on 160 rubles a month," he tells me. "There just isn't enough work." He has a point. According to Soviet officials, Tadzhikistan's birthrate of 45 per 1,000 is by far the highest in the Soviet Union, even as the republic's economy is one of the poorest. Joblessness is openly admitted by Tadzhik officials; an estimated 70,000 to 200,000 are out of work...
...said a peasant woman told her that before these changes, "If you went for a job interview, you must go to bed with the man before you get a job. Woman feeling plenty stronger now, because woman is protecting woman...
...Bolshevik Cabinet. He became Premier, with Trotsky as Foreign Minister. This was not because the Bolsheviks were the biggest or most popular party. In elections for a constituent assembly, they won only 25% of the votes, in contrast to about 62% for various moderate socialist groups, notably the peasant-backed Socialist Revolutionaries, and 13% for various bourgeois parties. Dismissing that as a "formal, juridical" matter, Lenin simply disbanded the constituent assembly after one meeting. And in 1918 he banned all parties other than his own, which he had renamed the Communist Party...