Word: soviet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...transports his audience back to the time before Mikhail Gorbachev began his reforms, a sclerotic period of repression and decline now viewed by many as an era of stability. The crowd loves it. The hall rocks with applause as Zyuganov denounces the upheavals that have destroyed the old-style Soviet system, and he blasts the West for "forcing ideas, concepts and changes on our country that will never bear good fruit...
...throughout the 1990s and then manage to maneuver the party back to the brink of power. The son of village schoolteachers in southwestern Russia, Zyuganov began his career as a full-time party worker in 1967. He was serving as a deputy chief of the ideology department of the Soviet Central Committee in 1990 when he helped found a separate Russian Communist Party. It was created to oppose the reformist course of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, led by Mikhail Gorbachev. Zyuganov proudly says he served as "a leading ideologist" in the failed 1991 communist putsch against Gorbachev...
...lack for choice when they go to the polls this Sunday to elect a new national parliament. Establishment figures like Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin are running, but so too is Dzhuna Davitashvili, an extrasensory healer formerly employed by aging Politburo members. Both the Communist Party, a remnant of the Soviet monolith, and the Beer Lover's Party have fielded candidates. All together 5,000 candidates are vying for the 450 seats of the State Duma, the lower house of the country's two-tier Federal Assembly. It would be no exaggeration to say Russia is experiencing an explosion of democracy...
Surprisingly, despite being ambassador to the Soviet Union during a volatile period in US-Soviet relations, Dobrynin managed to make many friends in Washington. His sociable character and cooperative attitude show clearly in his writing as well. Like a psychologist, though with less gravity, he describes the personality of a person before he begins to talk about his policies and decisions. He never misses the opportunity to include a few humorous anecdotes that help illustrate his point...
Dobrynin was successful at conflating a pro-American personal inclination with the policies of the Soviets. When Ronald Reagan was told that Dobrynin had been promoted to the rank of Secretary of the International Relations Department of the Communist Party and would not be returning as an ambassador, he asked, amazed: "Is he really a communist?" The effective blurring of Dobrynin's official position on matters and his own character keeps the reader perpetually guessing at whose side he was really on all that time. In the person of Dobrynin, yet another thread is added to the already complex fabric...