Word: stalinism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...political climate in the USSR is ripe for a confession. Criticism of Stalin and Russia's past mistakes is now chic. Adding another item to Stalin's list of atrocities is unlikely to provoke a conservative reaction, especially when the defense is so untenable. And with the recent Soviet acceptance of the binding decisions of the World Court, including its 1948 condemnation of genocide, Moscow's confession would be timely...
...citizens of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania love to watch grainy black- and-white documentary films of what it was like 50 years ago, before their lands were seized by Stalin, invaded by Hitler, then colonized by the Kremlin. They remember themselves as having been self-reliant yet outward looking. These are among the virtues that Gorbachev is now preaching for the Soviet Union as a whole. He is a Westernizer, in the tradition of an enlightened but ultimately frustrated school of 19th century Russian reformers. The Baltics are already the most Westernized of the 15 Soviet republics, and they...
There is a nice irony in Brecht's ferocious parable of capitalist greed playing in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, that pillared temple of capitalist philanthropy. The parable itself, though, is rather silly. Brecht was a brilliant playwright and poet, but his ideas were pure Stalin-era blustering. As a viewer sits watching the hero Jimmy get executed for having been unable to pay his bar bill, he can only marvel at the gorgeous music Weill provided for this nonsense...
...lying. They may be trying for objectivity, but given the book's title, the reader is sure to conclude that Sheridan's side is the one to pick. This lack of clarity is disturbing, considering that many of the book's statements have to do with politicians like Nixon, Stalin and Lenin--that is to say, people who should not be taken at their word...
...melancholy respect, there is nothing new in Fukuyama's pernicious nonsense. In the bad old days of Stalin and Brezhnev, too many Americans were preoccupied with the threat of Communism to attend adequately to Third World problems (overpopulation, underdevelopment, sectarian strife), as well as First World blights such as drugs and homelessness. Now, in the heady era of Gorbachev, some Western strategists may have redefined the challenge as coping with the decline of Communism, but their world view remains afflicted by a peculiar combination of arrogance and shortsightedness...