For them, kormlenie was a legitimate behavior sanctioned and approved by
czarism. Such a relationship was not just a whim of the country's paramount leader.
and at that the disadvantages under Bolshevism are rather less than those under
Czarism, as far as he is concerned.
The Catechism calls for total dedication to overthrowing the existing system, to doing anything, however cruel and treacherous, that furthers the cause; "he is not a revolutionary if he feels pity for anything in this world."(3) Hazy about specific historical circumstances, free of concrete alternatives to
czarism, the Catechism reads like a document produced by some desperate contemporary movement, the Khmer Rouge or the Shining Path.
Try to picture Lenin saying, "If
czarism works, I'll look at it."
Ukrainka was active in the Ukrainian struggle against
czarism and joined Ukrainian Marxist organizations, translating the Communist Manifesto into Ukrainian in 1902.
This is no justification for the absorption of countries which, as in the case of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, had achieved independence as a result of the downfall of
Czarism. But it is a fact which is nevertheless relevant to a judgment of the kind of considerations which determine the actions of the Soviet leaders--in this instance, a mixture of nationalism, a particular view of what Soviet security requires, a complete indifference to what the people concerned may or may not want, possibly combined with a belief that they must eventually come to see the benefits of their return to a Russian state that is now a Soviet commonwealth.
It is the struggle of democracy versus
czarism, even if for a few years
czarism called itself Communism.
Notwithstanding the promising initial reforms of President Mikheil Saakashvili, in general terms, the revolutionary eastern democracies have been characterized by eccentric forms of
czarism, instability, war, and profligate spending on subsidies and pensions (in Ukraine) and on weapons and thuggish security services (in Georgia).
However, the picture given in the 1960s highlighted the role of the national movement as a new period when great masses began their struggle against
czarism, landlords and capitalists.
Gorbachev found his model in the early Soviet years, before Lenin created the one-party dictatorship and Stalin the command economy, while Yeltsin, as I have recently shown ("The Process of Revolution in Russia," Problems of Post-Communism, May-June 1999), looked back to the semiconstitutional
czarism of 1905.
The Catechism calls for total dedication to overthrowing the existing system, to doing anything, however cruel and treacherous, that furthers the cause; "he is not a revolutionary if he feels pity for anything in this world." (3) Hazy about specific historical circumstances, free of concrete alternatives to
czarism, the Catechism reads like a document produced by some desperate contemporary movement, the Khmer Rouge or the Shining Path.