Word: social
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...this day. The reason has an important bearing on Beria. The 19th Century Russian satirist, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, noted: "In every other country little boys wear trousers, but not our boys . . . everywhere else reason rules, but here only the whistle of the lash. . . . [In Russia] no independent form of social order [has] yet developed...
...make his own distinctly Russian substitute for a "form of social order," Czar Nicholas I (called "The Nightstick") in 1826 decided to create a new thing, a secret police which later came to be called the Okhrana (Guard). The inception of this dreadful institution took place in a scene of sentimental horror. When the Okhrana's first chief, Count Alexander Benckendorff, reported to the Czar for instructions, the monarch pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and said: "Dry the tears of the oppressed. May your conscience and the conscience of your subordinates ever remain as stainless as this...
Something Borrowed. If Russia lacked "a form of social order" before the revolution, what was the case after Lenin completed his handiwork? He destroyed Russia's institutions and tried to impose a form of society of which 99 Russians out of 100 had never heard, which had not been tried anywhere, and for which Russia was called unfit by the very men who had invented this idea of society. If Czarism needed an Okhrana, clearly the Bolshevist state would need a super-Okhrana to fill the larger social vacuum...
...revolutionary theorist. Beria's Stalin is always right, always on the Leninist beam, always out in front of "the toiling masses." Why did this crass flattery matter to Stalin, who was already the world's most powerful autocrat? Precisely because the Communist regime had struck no real social roots, it attached fantastic importance to nuances of "theory." The Communist victory had been made by ideas in the heads of a handful of men, plus overwhelming police power used to cover up the failure of those ideas to create a genuine society...
...Dozen Don Quixotes. Except for a brief respite after the revolution of 1848, Daumier waged a running battle with the censors. When they bore down too hard, he turned from political to social satire, illustrated his favorite novel Don Quixote a dozen times, and ultimately got around to the easel-paintings-the blacksmiths and laundresses, as dignified as Rembrandt's illustrations of the Bible-on which his reputation as a 19th Century master largely rests...