Word: weimar
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...there a danger of the Soviet Union, like Weimar Germany, falling into the grip of a demagogue...
Historical parallels are never exact, of course. The Soviet Union is not fated to replay this capsule history of Germany's Weimar Republic. But the possibility cannot be dismissed either. And this time the drama might not take as long as the nine-plus years that elapsed between the failure of Adolf Hitler's 1923 beer-hall putsch and the founding of the Third Reich...
...there are disturbing resemblances to Weimar, there are also heartening differences. One is the diametrically opposite attitude of foreign governments. The victors of World War I were bent on humiliating and punishing Germany and saddled the Weimar regime with ruinous reparation payments that drained off badly needed resources. The winners of the cold war are warmly encouraging nascent democracy in what used to be the U.S.S.R. and are considering pumping in money and goods to prop...
...first essential for even moderating the slide is an agreement restoring some sort of economic cooperation among the republics. Without it, says Yasin, "I think we would have a 20% to 30% drop in production and inflation of 1,000%," a Weimar-like figure. Yavlinsky last week sent to the republics a draft of an agreement that would provide for a common banking system and a common currency -- the ruble -- and would make private property the basis for a new Soviet economy. But there are at least two competing plans being bruited about, and while the debate rages, the tide...
...course, it might be prevented from coming to power. Sheer self-interest may well push the republics, or at least most of the bigger ones, into an alliance that, combined with massive and timely Western aid, would stop the economic disintegration. And Russians have what German democrats in the Weimar period woefully lacked: forceful, popular leaders like Yeltsin -- who on the whole has been more democrat than autocrat -- St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoli Sobchak and Moscow Mayor Gavril Popov. Authoritarians as yet have no leader with any comparable clout. But a lawyer named Vladimir Zhirinovsky did run third in last June...