Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...only hope that the voters' attention turns back to domestic affairs next year -- and that its candidate has a sensible program to offer. Otherwise the Democrats face a chilling worst-case scenario: that the party of F.D.R. and J.F.K. may one day join the party of Lenin and Stalin on the ash heap of history...
...Gorbachev unilaterally end the decade-long occupation of Afghanistan? Could he pull the plug on Soviet support for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and pressure them into elections they would lose? More crucially, could he permit "fraternal" regimes to topple in Eastern Europe, giving up the buffer zone that Joseph Stalin had created after World War II and retiring the Warsaw Pact...
...cornerstones of perestroika. Under the slogan of demokratizatsiya, he created conditions around the country for popular local leaders, frequently outspoken nationalists, to defeat Moscow's minions. As a result of glasnost, the Kremlin faced up to some of the uglier truths of Soviet history, including the illegality of Stalin's annexation of the three Baltic republics...
Nadezhda Mandelstam, the brilliant, bitter memoirist of the Stalin era, wrote in the early '70s: "Evil has great momentum, but the forces of good are inert. The masses . . . have no fight in them, and will acquiesce in whatever happens." Until last week the Russian character was judged to be politically passive, even receptive to brutal rule. At first the coup seemed to confirm the norm. The news administered a dark shock, followed immediately by a depressed sense of resignation: of course, of course, the Russians must revert to their essential selves, to their own history. Gorbachev and glasnost were...
...Gang of Eight was caught between the feud and the change. Its coup looked like Stalin's ruthlessness written on the fifth carbon, a smudgy, illegible piece of work. It was fitting that stupidity should be a prevailing theme. An oafish brainlessness has for decades hung over the Soviet communist venture like one of Nikita Khrushchev's suits. Its secret has never been intelligence but rather ruthlessness. The cardinal rule of coupmaking, says Edward Luttwak of Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, is "to seize control of all the centers of power in one fell swoop, to paralyze...