Word: soviet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...shouldn't freedom outweigh the drawbacks of reform? Not in Russia, which has no tradition of viewing freedom as a value. Alexander Yakovlev, who was a top adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet President, once put it this way: "We're not just trying to establish a reformed system. We're trying to dismantle the 1,000-year-old Russian paradigm of unfreedom." Trying--and perhaps failing once more. The words Ivan Turgenev wrote in The Dream more than a century ago, some years after Alexander II's decision to free the serfs, could apply today: "And once again...
...Zyuganov's politics are malleable. He is, at once, red enough for old-style Communists and white enough for hard-line nationalists. At a late-April meeting with the candidate in the town of Sosnovy Bor, due west of St. Petersburg, an old man with damp eyes and a Soviet-flag pin stuck in his lapel reverently described Zyuganov as ''one of the best leaders our party has ever had." At a May Day rally in Moscow, the heads of various nationalist movements praised Zyuganov as someone who shares their anti-Western, often anti-Semitic beliefs. In St. Petersburg...
Zyuganov steadily climbed the rungs of the regional party apparatus in Oryol, becoming chief of ideology. He was also tapped by the party's Central Committee to go to Moscow. Instead of settling behind a desk, Zyuganov was sent around the Soviet Union to check on party work, an experience that he says put him in touch with the country's problems. In 1990 he broke with then party leader Mikhail Gorbachev and helped found a hard-line Communist Party based in Russia...
...Andrei Kozyrev, and abused him, in the same terms used by the opposition, as being too pro-Western. Yeltsin has also usurped a fair amount of nationalist, great-power rhetoric, and he has signed a treaty with Belarus that permits people to believe he favors re-creating the old Soviet empire (a Communist priority). Suddenly too the old World War II Red Army "victory banner" has been ordered flown alongside Russia's new white-blue-and-red tricolor on occasions commemorating that...
...party platform. "That could lead to civil war." But, he invariably adds, we would "of course consider" renationalizing those concerns that have been "privatized illegally." All of this is part of the Zyuganov two-step. He rants against capitalism and the West before audiences nostalgic for the Soviet Union--and tamps down the fire when he talks to moderates...