Word: totalitarian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Every few months these professors published articles in obscure academic journals laden with phrases such as "totalitarian," "spiritless" and "crushing burden of communism." When news was especially slow, they published their articles again in a different font...
...never hear a coherent analysis of the Cultural Revolution, an event that so inverted the natural order that parents were shamed, beaten and in some instances even killed by their own children. All I pick up is a line or two about the traditional absence of psychological study in totalitarian societies, and some bits and pieces, mostly about the worship of Mao as a semidivine figure, and tales of the Chairman's senility...
...have brought them to this juncture, they lack a common vision of where they are going. Acknowledged Solidarity leader Lech Walesa: "Nobody has previously taken the road that leads from socialism to capitalism." Poland and Hungary are pressing ahead with sweeping reforms that promise to disprove the theory that totalitarian regimes cannot change. Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Bulgaria tinker with old formulas in hopes they can stave off a reckoning with the new. Only Rumania, under the tyrannosaurus-like leadership of Nicolae Ceausescu, stubbornly pursues the Stalinist agenda without obstruction. As each country feels its way through this difficult period...
...staking out a program that would create something akin to social democracy. Perhaps most daring, it proposes eliminating Article VI of the Constitution, which entrenches the Communist Party as the "leading and guiding force" in all aspects of the society. Dumping this provision would effectively reverse Lenin's totalitarian doctrine that the party must control the state...
Medvedev's assertions point straight to Gorbachev's fundamental problem: how to realize the "democratization" he has proclaimed within the totalitarian institutions of the one-party Soviet state. Unfortunately, it is not in the power of even so perspicacious a historian as Medvedev to resolve that fateful dilemma. Perhaps that is why he has become, at 63, a fledgling parliamentarian...