Word: stalinist
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Most significant, perhaps, is the forthright admission by the Soviets that they are trying to shed the burden of a rigidly centralized economy based on Leninist-Stalinist principles. The eulogies on the death of Communism may be premature, but there are signs that a verdict is being reached in the long twilight struggle between this century's two dominant ideologies. While scrambling to find euphemisms for such apostate phrases as "private property," the Soviets are jettisoning many of their Communist tenets in favor of some that are at the heart of democratic capitalism: contested elections, pluralism, codified individual rights, market...
...NIGHT WATCH by Mikhail Kurayev (Novy Mir, No. 2, 1989). A fascinating journey inside the mind of a fictional secret policeman, Comrade Polubolotov, who helped carry out the murderous Stalinist purges of the 1930s but insists he was merely "a soldier...
...ways was U.S. pressure of the past 40 years, so no change in U.S. policy is in order now. This line of argument underestimates the internal origins of Soviet reform. Gorbachev is not so much saying "uncle" to Uncle Sam as he is addressing the failures of the Leninist-Stalinist system. Moreover, he is doing so in a way that is earning him worldwide credit for being flexible and forward-looking, while the U.S. is in danger of appearing sluggish and uncertain...
...police held back traffic as an elated throng of 75,000 marchers snaked through the streets of central Budapest waving red-white-and-green Hungarian flags and shouting "Democracy!" Under banners as disparate as those of the liberal reformist Hungarian Democratic Forum and the neo-Stalinist Ferenc Munnich Society, independent political clubs and parties reveled peacefully last week in the first officially sanctioned street demonstrations since last fall, when legislation for sweeping political reforms was introduced, including a multiparty system for the socialist state. Thousands more Hungarians marked National Day by heading -- literally -- for the exits. Easy access to passports...
...Bulgaria an aging leadership shows no sign of interest in homegrown perestroika. In Czechoslovakia, where leading dissident Vaclav Havel has been sentenced to jail, trials moved into a second month for other activists held on charges ranging from organizing peaceful antigovernment demonstrations to signing political petitions. And in Stalinist Rumania, party leader Nicolae Ceausescu remains the "Idi Amin of Communism," as his neighbors call him. The unregenerate totalitarian, obsessed with stamping his personal mark on the physiology and psychology of his country, brooks no opposition. When six retired high-ranking officials released a letter harshly condemning his brutally repressive regime...