Word: vanguardism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Mozambique. President Joaquim Chissano is showing much more pragmatism than Mengistu. Last summer Chissano's government abandoned the Marxist-Leninist credo that his Frelimo Party has embraced since it came to power in 1975. Transformed from "a vanguard of the worker and peasant alliance" to "a party of all the Mozambican people," the ruling group has stepped up market reforms that it initiated in the mid-1980s. Last January Chissano introduced a draft constitution that embraces universal suffrage, a secret ballot, direct election of both the President and the parliament and the reintroduction of private ownership of land...
California's politicians are merely in the vanguard of a broadening national trend. The Bush Administration is increasingly perceived to be lagging behind the public mood. The President two weeks ago disappointed many members of an international conference on climate change in Washington with a cautious, no- action speech. He disillusioned environmentalists again last week by defending offshore oil drilling, even if he had yet to rule on the question of new leases off the California and Florida coasts...
...tiny party immediately divided. Lenin was determined that it should remain small, highly disciplined and "as conspiratorial as possible." It must be the "vanguard of the working class" but no more than a vanguard. Lenin's more open-minded opponents wanted to take in any and all supporters, find partners and make coalitions. Lenin, as usual, insisted on getting his way, and he got it. With their majority, the Leninists took the name of Bolshevik, after bolshoi, big. The smaller group was called Mensheviks (minority...
...opening address, but participants detected a quaver of tension in his voice. It was not his purpose, he said, "to dramatize the situation and impart a tragic character" to the fateful decisions facing the plenum, but "the party will be able to fulfill its mission as a political vanguard only if it drastically restructures itself, masters the art of political work in present conditions and succeeds in cooperating with all forces committed to perestroika." No burst of thunderous applause greeted the end of his hour-long speech. After enduring a gauntlet of criticism at a plenum last December, Gorbachev...
...security forces controlling the capital. Many of the restrictions on demonstrations and strikes in Beijing have been codified in municipal regulations every bit as tough as the martial-law decree, and the independent student associations that mobilized demonstrators last spring remain outlawed. In any case, the dissident vanguard has been shattered as dozens of student leaders and their intellectual mentors have fled the country or gone underground; many more have been jailed or executed. In this atmosphere, disgruntled students and faculty alike have been lying low, stoically enduring hours of brain-numbing political re-education, until another opportunity for change...