Word: communisms
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Poland is another example of the failure of Communism. Bullying, beating and interning people who want to be free are signs of a frightened, cowardly ideology in chaos. Walls, guards and barbed-wire fences should be put up around prisons-not nations. Richard Sypen Aurora, Ohio
...Tolstoy, on the one hand, and his vicious debunking of Dostoevsky, on the other. The final ranking is, officially: 1. Tolstoy; 2. Gogol; 3. Chekhov; 4. Turgenev. Dostoevsky is dead last. Nabokov accuses him of sloppy and melodramatic Christianity, reactionary slavophilism (which Nabokov links with both Fascism and Communism), lack of artistic sense or taste, and a hackneyed, long-winded style. He doesn't have much to say about the works themselves, and, in fact, Nabokov ignores The Brothers Karamazov altogether. When, in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov kills an old woman "for some reason or other," Nabokov asks, "Who cares...
...also because she refuses to cede the term "liberal" to those to her left. "I am understood by people who know my work to be a traditional nineteenth-century political liberal," she says. "Liberalism has all too frequently been defined in its century by one's toleration of Soviet Communism...
WHAT, THEN, can the West do? It must start by comprehending the significance of the "Solidarity affair." The rise of a union that cried out for food as well as freedom shows the utter sterility of Communism and the gradual disintegration of the Soviet economic model. In the Soviet Union and most of the Eastern bloc countries, people are fed, clothed and housed at the barest level of subsistence. In Hungary, perhaps the sole exception to this rule, "socialist" market economy reforms have slowly--and quietly--phased in, bringing relatively more freedom and prosperity...
...Communism is serious competition for other social and economic systems in large measure because it is backed up by the threat of Soviet force. The leaders and citizens of other lands would not feel quite so haunted by the specter of Communism if they were not concerned about Soviet troops over the border, or missiles over the horizon, or secret stockpiles of Kalashnikov automatic rifles and cadres of KGB agents