Word: totalitarian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...could such a monster gain absolute ascendancy over the Soviet Union? In this book Medvedev backs away from his earlier position that Stalinism was essentially an aberration on the road to a more benevolent Communism envisioned by Lenin. The historian has re-examined the totalitarian system created by Lenin and now suspects that Stalinism sprang from Leninism, as many American Sovietologists have concluded. Though Medvedev never fully confronts this issue, he emphatically makes one crucial point: when Lenin banned all opposition groups and factions in 1921, the ensuing one-party dictatorship was "a very important condition for Stalin's usurpation...
...less an authority than Karl Marx asserted that the political order of a country derives from the economic relations among its citizens (although Adam Smith had figured out the same thing in the previous century). The leaders of the Russian and Chinese revolutions imposed on the people a totalitarian form of the social compact: You give up your freedom, and we'll make sure you live decently. Bread was one of the most common words on the banners that the workers carried through the streets of Petrograd in 1917, and the promise of food was an important theme...
...Palestinian uprising is now 18 months old. It is a stain on a country whose existence is grounded in protection against totalitarian abuse. If the case for "Rage" is right, then we could all learn something from the public viewing of the film...
...have accomplished a number of things. Primarily, it would have proven that left-wing activists actually believe that freedom is more than a convenient rhetorical phrase. It also would have done a great deal to dispel the idea that the leftists are nothing but dangerous reds with a paternalistic, totalitarian ideas about controlling who hears what. If the left wants America or Harvard to be a held to a higher standard, we must be ready to apply those higher standards to ourselves...
Even more important, as Moscow has recently discovered, the totalitarian solution cannot work indefinitely. Sooner or later the sacrifice of individuals standards of living leads to domestic problems: low work incentives, low labor productivity, economic stagnation and eventually, as events prove, domestic turmoil...