Word: begun
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Such periodicals as Ogonyok and Moscow News churn out article after article attacking Stalin or rehabilitating his victims; even Leon Trotsky, Stalin's archenemy, can be portrayed with some sympathy. Excerpts from Let History Judge, a scathing work that historian Roy Medvedev published in the West in 1971, have begun appearing in the Soviet press, and the entire book is scheduled for publication late this year. The book argues that the Gulag's supposed labor camps were often really death camps set up by Stalin to kill prisoners through hard labor, starvation rations, harsh climate and lack of medical attention...
There are signs that the revision of history is going further than Gorbachev ever bargained for. Some members of Memorial and other intellectuals have begun calling for a public trial of Stalin, a move that might raise questions embarrassing to the Communist leadership. Still, as Belorussian writer Alexander Adamovich says, "had there not been a trial at Nuremberg, Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz or Buchenwald might have been denied by later generations. Our history must also have a legal foundation based on solid documentation...
More important, a few Soviet intellectuals have begun arguing that a re- examination of the country's bloody past should not stop with Stalin but should go on to -- whisper it -- Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin himself, and to some of his principles, such as the centralization of all power in the Communist Party. Gorbachev often represents his policies as a return to the pure tenets of Lenin that Stalin perverted. But a few voices are suggesting, at least by implication, that the history debate is ultimately about the legitimacy of the Soviet state, a state with no validation other than...
...alcohol abuse had declined so much that the janitor no longer found enough empty bottles to make a twice-daily trash run into town. The 130 cooperative members earned, on average, 625 rubles ($1,000) a month, about 2 1/2 times the norm for factory workers. Production had begun to meet demand...
...agree, things have changed. I tell my questioner that they've also published dissident writers such as Vladimir Voinovich and Georgi Vladimov, they've begun little by little to publish me, and they're even allowing some limited criticism of the General Secretary. If things go any further...