Word: totalitarianism
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...