An extract on #lensculturestreets
On 19 June 1965, Houari Boumdienne deposed Ahmed Ben Bella in a military coup d'tat that was both swift and bloodless. Ben Bella "disappeared", and would not be seen again until he was released from house arrest in 1980 by Boumdienne's successor, Colonel Chadli Bendjedid. Boumdienne immediately dissolved the National Assembly and suspended the 1963 constitution. Political power resided in the Council of the Revolution, a predominantly military body intended to foster cooperation among various factions in the army and the party.
Houari Boumdiennes position as head of government and of state was initially not secure partly because of his lack of a significant power base outside the armed forces; he relied strongly on a network of former associates known as the Oujda group (after his posting as ALN leader in the Moroccan border town of Oujda during the war years), but he could not fully dominate the fractious regime. This situation may have accounted for his deference to collegial rule.
Following attempted coupsmost notably that of chief-of-staff Col. Tahar Zbiri in December 1967and a failed assassination attempt in (April 25, 1968), Boumdienne consolidated power and forced military and political factions to submit. He took a systematic, authoritarian approach to state building, arguing that Algeria needed stability and an economic base before any political institutions.
Eleven years after Houari Boumdienne took power, after much public debate, a long-promised new constitution was promulgated in November 1976, and Boumdienne was elected president with 95 percent of the cast votes.
Much of Russia's expansion occurred in the 17th century, culminating in the first Russian colonisation of the Pacific in the mid-17th century, the Russo-Polish War (165467) that incorporated left-bank Ukraine, and the Russian conquest of Siberia. Poland was divided in the 17901815 era, with much of the land and population going to Russia. Most of the 19th century growth came from adding territory in Asia, south of Siberia.
Unlike his father, the new tsar Alexander III (18811894) was throughout his reign a staunch reactionary who revived the maxim of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and National Character". A committed Slavophile, Alexander III believed that Russia could be saved from chaos only by shutting itself off from the subversive influences of Western Europe. In his reign Russia concluded the union with republican France to contain the growing power of Germany, completed the conquest of Central Asia, and exacted important territorial and commercial concessions from China.
The tsar's most influential adviser was Konstantin Pobedonostsev, tutor to Alexander III and his son Nicholas, and procurator of the Holy Synod from 1880 to 1895. He taught his royal pupils to fear freedom of speech and press and to hate democracy, constitutions, and the parliamentary system. Under Pobedonostsev, revolutionaries were hunted down and a policy of Russification was carried out throughout the empire.