Word: states
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...growing more unstable. Sullen class rivalry has already developed, particularly between the bureaucratic elite and a middle class of intellectuals, managers and professionals. Both, in turn, are distrusted by the great surly majority-he mass of peasants and former peasants. At present, says Amalric, the people and the state face each other like "one man with his hands raised above his head while another points a tommy gun at his stomach." Inevitably, he says, the state "will get tired and lower the tommy gun." The result will not really be "liberalization" but anarchy...
What then? Remnants of the middle class, if powerful enough, might be able to stitch together a loose federation, something like the British Commonwealth, out of some of the Soviet republics. But in Central Asia, Amalric writes, there would probably remain a lone state that would regard itself as "the U.S.S.R.'s successor." It would integrate "traditional Communist ideology with the features of Oriental despotism...
...trial for civil rights activities, Grigorenko was arrested for "anti-Soviet agitation." Last week, a medical board in Tashkent decreed that he was "paranoid with symptoms of atherosclerosis" and dispatched him to another asylum-a favorite Soviet prescription for discrediting dissenters. Also reported to be held in a Soviet state institution last week: Ivan Yakhimovich, onetime chairman of a Latvian collective farm, who betrayed his mental aberration in 1968 by supporting Alexander Dubček's liberal Communist regime in Czechoslovakia...
Aside from the fact that it was the place where Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton filmed Graham Greene's novel, The Comedians, Dahomey's chief claim to notoriety is its penchant for coups d'état. Since 1963, the tiny West African state (pop. 2,500,000 in an area of 44,290 sq. mi.) has experienced four coups, all bloodless. Last week Dahomey suffered its fifth coup in six years, but this time the takeover was not bloodless. When President Emile Zinsou, 51, an able, French-trained medical doctor, arrived at his seaside palace...
...hours last September, U.S. Ambassador to Brazil C. Burke Elbrick suggested that Washington might want to transfer him to another post. The ambassador argued that he was indebted to the Brazilian junta (which freed 15 political prisoners to obtain his release) and therefore could no longer be effective. The State Department decided otherwise. Recalling that Nelson Rockefeller had earned high marks for machismo by doggedly continuing his South American tour despite a violent reception, Foggy Bottom ordered Elbrick to stay on because it would be the gutsy thing to do. Maybe too gutsy...