Ignjatović sensed the ugly and shameful future that lay in store for the Serbs and Croats who rose up against Magyars under reactionary leaders.

Eight years after Carlo Bonaparte's death in 1785, the family came into conflict with the increasingly reactionary nationalist leader, Pasquale Paoli and was forced to flee to the French mainland.

The commentator urged the Organization of African Unity to "deal with the reactionary and recalcitrant leaders who have ganged up with Israel and South Africa to destroy the continent."

The C.I.A. assessment spelled out the possibilities in no uncertain terms: "reactionary leaders, with or without Gorbachev, could judge that the last chance to act had come and move under the banner of law and order."

But some eighty-five percent of the rural Afrikaner population would rather die than accept even one of those changes, and they are assured by their reactionary leaders, lay and cleric, that they are right.

Another reactionary leader wrote in 1985 of "the immigration plague," and said that immigration "could become a mortal threat."

Above all, whoever occupied the throne would have been subject to the powerful pressure that Nicholas experienced from the United Nobility, the Orthodox Church and reactionary leaders of the Right.

If political and economic freedom fails in Russia, this will encourage the reactionary leaders of other nations to resist reform.

So it seems a natural development that reactionary leaders, amid calls to protect the 25 million Russians living outside Russia's borders, send troops against local authorities in Tadzhikistan, Moldova, even Ukraine.

But what you should really be looking at is the response in the hearts of the Turkish-Cypriots, whose demonstrations show exactly what they think of their reactionary leaders.