Word: russian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Most societies have revolutions - or claim to," observes Historian S. Frederick Starr. "What made the Russian Revolution so important was that it made more extensive claims for itself than others had. It was the first to claim significance .aching into every corner of the globe, and that's where its mythology came from." How well does that mythology square with reality? Many different measures must be applied to judge the successes and failures of the immense, visionary and often brutal venture...
...formidable superpower that after six decades lumbers about the world in all the panoply and menace of one of history's great empires. Some historians argue, plausibly enough, that Russia with its vast resources, would have developed just as impressively or better, under quite different management Nevertheless, the Russian Empire that the Bolsheviks inherited in 1917 was a fairly primitive vastness, although some industrialization had begun. Despite its bloody civil war (1918-22) Stalin's savage purges in the '30s and the devastations of World War II, the Soviet Union has risen to rival American influence around...
revolution, bureaucracy and Russian tradition. Revolution, once but briefly, was everything; years ago tradition and bureaucracy defeated it. The Revolution has ended by instituting a new form of authoritarian state, quite reactionary, now ruled by a gerontocracy (average age of Politburo members...
...fundamental and perhaps unanswerable question is whether the Revolution yielded such a dictatorial result because it was socialistic or because it was Russian. It has in any case given a bad name to what I many find the ennobling idea of equalitarianism. Russia has a dark and painful history of authoritarianism - a hatred of authority, but a need for it. Russians seem to fear disorder and mistrust foreigners. In fact, the young are now participating in a revival of nationalism...
Although it has become a mockery of its original promise, the Revolution is unlikely ever again to be as frightful as it was under Stalin, if only because the Russian people are so much better informed now and probably would not stand for such mass terror. Then, the poet Anna Akhmatova wrote: "The stars of death stood over us./ And Russia, guiltless, be loved, writhed/ under the crunch of bloodstained boots,/ under the wheels of Black Marias." Life under Lenin's current successor has relaxed, grown somewhat less bleak, but there still seems no prospect that the mythology will...