Word: bolshevik
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Skriabins sent their son to the Czarist high school in Kazan. Eventually he made his way to the Polytechnic Institute in far-off St. Petersburg (now Leningrad). Molotov studied Marx, and in a dark, musty cellar pledged his life and liberty to the Bolshevik party. He was 16 and "sentimental"- a "slight, fragile youth," as one of the comrades described him, "with wild hair and a small, pale face lighted with brilliant, myopic eyes burning under a bulging brow...
...Lenin made Molotov Second Secretary of the Communist Party Secretariat. The first secretary: his old ally Joseph Stalin. In the Trotsky-Stalin feud Molotov stuck by Joe, helped him transform the dictatorship of the proletariat into the dictatorship of the secretariat. One by one, the Old Bolshevik revolutionaries went down before Stalin's wrath: Trotsky the warlord, Zinoviev, chief of the Communist International, Bukharin, Lenin's "closest disciple" and longtime editor of Pravda, Kamenev, ambassador to London and Rome, Tomsky, head of trade unions, Rykov, head of government. Their power went to Stalin, their jobs to his faithful...
Prime Minister Antonin Zapotocky (rhymes with Trotsky), a gaunt old man of 69 with stainless-steel teeth, delivered the longest funeral oration (27 minutes). An Old Bolshevik and longtime trades unionist, Zapotocky had once been popular with the Czech workers, but had alienated them by harsh complaints and horny-handed methods of spurring production...
Actually, the editors had dug out an old Sovfoto picture taken back in 1937, when Joseph Stalin was busily purging his Old Bolshevik pals and grinding out propaganda that they were traitors who deserved to be shot. One sharp-eyed Times reader, Editor, Author and ex-Communist Max Eastman, who reads Russian, spotted something the Times editors had missed on a propaganda poster raised above the crowd. Wrote Eastman to the Times: the Salisbury story gave "the impression of an entire nation orphaned and in deep mourning. Perhaps it would help toward an understanding of the deeper state of mind...
There was just one Old Bolshevik left: Stalin sent out his new operatives after him. Halfway round the world, a young Spanish Communist named Mercader, alias Monar (with an assist from the New York Communist Party), found Trotsky in Mexico City and killed him with an alpenstock...