Word: stalinists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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They will learn, as many Americans have, that they don't count under capitalism, that capitalism means today, as it has in the past, "the freedom for the stupid to starve." These cogs that fit so well in the old Stalinist machine will be the Soviet homeless, unemployed, uninsured, and uneducated, toosed out in the streets as they are here, avoided and ignored. They will be the relics of a failed system, left to rot on cabbage and stale rye bread as their grandchildren either forgot them in the quest for that elusive first million or turn away...
During a period of spectacular and almost entirely happy endings -- the Kremlin's capitulation in its global rivalry with the U.S., the emancipation of Eastern Europe, the dismantling of the last vestiges of the Stalinist police state and the retirement without honor of the mother of all Communist Parties -- it has been sufficient for Bush to lead the decorous applause. But now the situation is changing in ways that no longer play to his strengths...
...dozen soldiers who marched to the central telegraph office on Tverskaya Street, when confronted by outraged Muscovites, showed them that the clip of his automatic weapon was empty. When the tanks did move, people were ready with gasoline-filled bottles (named, of course, after the old Stalinist V.M. Molotov). Tank drivers, even paratroop commanders, defected to the resistance. Miners went on strike...
Independent power centers have taken hold in the new Soviet Union. There are republic leaders, legitimately elected mayors, legislators, independent journalists. The society is too various and too well educated for rulers to control in the old Stalinist way. Russians are not, as Marx called them, "rude Asiatics." Blair Ruble, director of the Kennan Institute of Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center, has observed, "There has been a general trend throughout the postwar period toward increasing education, urbanization and professionalization of the labor force. Those trends bring with them different attitudes toward authority and a greater desire...
...Gorbachev of glasnost and democratization in '89 turns into the bad Gorbachev of Bloody Sunday in Lithuania last January. Others believe in a linear theory: the breakup of the Soviet Empire and the transformation of the internal order have passed the point of no return, the keepers of the Stalinist flame are on their last legs, it is too late for a rightist coup; therefore Gorbachev's accommodations with the right accomplish nothing except to render him irrelevant...