Word: suppressing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Gorbachev and his reformist allies in Eastern Europe have managed to suppress at least one monster -- the state's capacity for terrible violence against its citizens. The Chinese and, until last week, the Rumanians were not so lucky. The Chinese students carried portraits of the Soviet leader, and they were shouting, "In Russia they have Gorbachev; in China we have whom?" The yin and yang of 1989: tanks vs. glasnost, the dead hand of the past vs. Gorbachev's vigorous, risky plunge into the future. Gorbachev is a hero for what he would not do -- in fact, could...
...revolutionary renovation of socialism, of our entire society." What this grand but vague formulation has meant in practice is the scaling back of coercion and the introduction of an unprecedented, until recently unimaginable degree of pluralism. As he put it in his 1987 book Perestroika, "It is possible to suppress, compel, bribe, break or blast, but only for a certain period...