Word: soviets
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...years a standard bearer of what he called "libertarian conservatism" in the otherwise mainly predictably liberal Op-Ed pages of the New York Times. A former public-relations executive who claimed to have staged the famous 1959 "kitchen debate" in Moscow between then Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev on the merits of capitalism and communism, Safire went on to work in the White House as a speechwriter, before starting a career as a wordsmith at the Times. And a wordsmith he was: in addition to his columns, Safire also penned (a verb I suspect he would...
...self-selected leaders, which tolerates no opposition. The Party's powerful Organization Department oversees all major appointments in the country, and one must really be a party member to get ahead professionally. Party and government organs remain essentially as they were six decades ago, copied from the Soviet Union...
...result it is becoming a hybrid party with elements of East Asian neo-authoritarianism, Latin American corporatism and European social democracy all grafted to Confucianist-Leninist roots. The uprising in Tiananmen and across China in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of communist systems in Europe and the Soviet Union were instructive experiences for the CCP. Many lessons were drawn, but the principal one was to remain flexible and adaptable, not dogmatic and rigid. (Read "Beijing Clamps Down After Call for Democracy...
Fears of spontaneous disintegration have grown in recent years. First, much of the country did, in fact, disappear after the 1991 communist collapse, only to reappear in the form of 14 independent, post-Soviet republics. Then came the Yeltsin era, with its newfound freedoms and widespread sense of dislocation. Then, in 2000, came the Putin era, in which state-orchestrated television stoked fears of a return to the Yeltsin era (lest the masses not entrust their president with lots of power). Then, in May 2008, came Dmitry Medvedev, causing many to fret that the new president would...
...China or Japan. It takes just hours by train for anyone in Vladivostok or Khabarovsk, separated by China by the Amur River, to reach Chinese commercial hubs like Jixi and Shuangyashan. It takes nearly a week to get to Moscow. In Khabarovsk, the Lada, the boxy, no-frills Soviet compact ubiquitous in European Russia, is vastly outnumbered by Toyotas, Nissans and Hyundais on the highway connecting Irkutsk, on the eastern fringe of Siberia, with Vladivostok. "They call the Far East the Land of the White Toyotas," Moisseev says. He added that First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov had been spending...