Word: vacuum
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Vacuum of Power. Thus, virtually without bloodshed, nearly 400 years of czardom was swept away in a stroke. But creating from scratch a new government able to rule the vast reaches of Russia proved far more difficult. The Duma committee had included every shade of political color, from socialists to disaffected aristocracy. To head the first provisional government that followed. Prince Lvov, a liberal nobleman, was chosen. The Bolsheviks soon withdrew their tacit support from this "bourgeois" government, and Lenin hurried back to Petrograd to organize his attack. By July 2 he had mounted a sufficiently impressive uprising of sailors...
...these factors combined to create an uncertainty, a vacuum of aggressive power, that Lenin's hard-eyed coalition of workers and soldiers could exploit. Backed by Trotsky and the youthful Iosif Stalin, Lenin late in October sent his armed Bolsheviks to take over all the main government buildings in Petrograd. Kerensky's government was besieged in the Winter Palace. When it refused to surrender, the cruiser Aurora fired a warning blank, the palace was stormed, and the Cabinet arrested-save for Kerensky, who managed to escape. The coup d'état was complete in Petrograd; democracy...
...which required structure-beginning, middle, end-and forced the writer or reader out of immediate experience and into an abstracted, objective remove from "group reality." According to McLuhan, the advent of "electrical technology"-radio and records, television and telephones-has changed all that. Man today is returning, through the vacuum tube, to a tribal-type perception, and is no longer tied to rational, sequential modes of thought...
This does not mean that the Institute's research functions will be carried out in a vacuum. Neustadt explains that the concerns of the study groups will, in all cases, "have prospective, but definitely not immediate relevance for policy-makers." But, he adds, all their activities will be exempt from any sort of outside pressure, although Neustadt feels that the members of the individual groups may wish to invite government officials to their meetings to discuss particular issues...
...department devoted to the dark arts of espionage is remarkably new to the U.S. Until Pearl Harbor, American espionage was essentially the property of the military services. The Japanese sneak attack was one of history's most flagrant failures of applied foreknowledge, Sun Tzu-style. To fill the vacuum, the Office of Strategic Services was hastily constituted during World War II, and it was from this agency that CIA evolved into a permanent peacetime department under the 1947 National Security...