czarism

By allowing moral righteousness to overwhelm realism, they endorsed every eastern European anti-Russian revolt post-1989 and admitted former Soviet colonies into NATO, thereby accelerating Russia's return to czarism.

A series of well-publicized Moscow Trials, purges, and executions eliminated the entire generation of revolutionary leadership that had secured the Bolshevik triumph over Czarism. This left Stalin and his sycophantic hangers-on in absolute control of a Soviet state that bore little resemblance to the structures of governance associated with Lenin and the revolutionary practices of 1917.

During the final years of Czarism in Russia, 1,144 political prisoners were executed following the failed 1905 revolution.

During the last decades of czarism, German nobles from the Baltics practically took over the czar's court, resulting in the spread of their retrograde ideas.

White Russian General Arsene de Goulevitch, in his book Czarism and the Revolution, wrote, "The main purveyors of funds for the revolution, however, were neither the crackpot Russian millionaires nor the armed bandits of Lenin.

IN FEBRUARY 1917, a 30-year-old Bolshevik named Valerian Osinsky wrote to his 22-year-old mistress about a coming revolution that would wipe away czarism and deliver what Christianity couldn't: the kingdom of heaven on earth.

In Russia, everyone except the czar himself and his courtiers and the circles of black reaction knew that czarism, the social system, was shaky in the extreme, and was bound to collapse.

There, this particular Apis mellifera, brought east by Ukrainian settlers in the dying days of Czarism during the 1890s, has coexisted with the varroa mite for more than 100 years.

All good Leninists and students of Lenin knew, or thought they knew, that Leninism had disposed of Czarism, definitively putting paid to Russia's royalist tradition.

As historian Yuri Slezkine's work has shown, the multinational and/or multi-ethnic collective identities that were evident at the end of the Soviet period reflected not only the persistence of the past (from czarism to post-socialism) but also the traditions that were invented through Soviet cultural policies.

The "good czarism" of Misha Saakashvili and his party, which succeeded in reforming, modernizing, and Westernizing Georgia's economy and political system, seems to have given way to the disorderly populism of the eccentric Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, who thus far has shown no understanding of due process or political tolerance.

The "Young Russia" movement of the 186os called for a relentless war to be waged against czarism. One of its leaders, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, was arrested, imprisoned and condemned to forced labour in Siberia, but he managed to write a revolutionary novel, What Is to Be Done?, while incarcerated.