Nation Topics - World | The Nation

The rulers of the capitalist world who came to Paris
for the bicentennial celebrations last month were
in a smug mood.

Dual power, Lenin wrote, cannot last long. But just how long?

For the next weeks and months the eyes of the world
will be focused on Poland, where events are now unfolding at an unexpectedly dramatic pace.

Slogans sometimes succeed in conveying the mood of a period.

History knows no neat radical breaks.

"The Party always arrives five minutes after the hour," one critical East Berlin Communist complained bitterly, just as events there were gathering momentum.

"Havel to the castle": In the doubly festive mood just before Christmas the heart of Prague was full of posters bearing that slogan and a picture of Vaclav Havel, the
famous playwright, his shi

"Is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union still the ruling party, the political vanguard of the people? . . . Should there be a multiparty system? Does the C.P.S.U.

I thought I was going to the opulent city of Bologna, with its ancient red-brick palaces, for the funeral of the Italian Communist Party.

This is the rather flattering self-portrait of a populist leader who has already traveled quite far: Boris Yeltsin, once a protégé of Mikhail Gorbachev, is now his main, and very re