Word: precursor
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...Leningrad Party Chief Sergei Kirov by a Trotskyite dissident. It was that event that set the stage for one of the most terrifying eras of modern history: the Great Purges of the 1930s, or, as Khrushchev calls them, "the meat mincer." The NKVD, Stalin's secret police and precursor of today's KGB, suddenly became all-powerful, and thousands of party officials and army officers began to vanish. Khrushchev survived the grim era in willing ignorance. "I don't know where these people were sent," he says. "I never asked. If you weren't told something...
...tendency has been to treat ancient Egyptian art as merely an impressive precursor to the masterpieces of classical Greece. And with some reason, since Egyptian art was known to most viewers only through those available examples brought home by 19th century plunderers. To the Western eye, attuned to the realistic and lyric drapery of Greek sculpture, most seemed sleekly stylized, looking vaguely like objects suitable for reproduction as paperweights...
Lenin applied his theories in the name of Karl Marx but, as Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington observes, "Lenin was not a disciple of Marx, rather Marx was a precursor of Lenin." Marx had not the faintest notion of what practical strategy and tactics could achieve his revolutionary goals. In many ways, Lenin revised-some would say subverted-the teachings of his proclaimed mentor. Marx predicted that the revolution would be possible only in industrially advanced nations, as the inevitable culmination of capitalist development. Lenin demonstrated that a successful Socialist revolution could take place in a backward, predominantly peasant...