Word: bolshevik
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Ultimately, no one really knows what factors come into play when the succession is decided. The process is still an enigma, enveloped in nearly 70 years of Bolshevik devotion to intrigue and secrecy. As far as experts can tell, a tiny handful of powerful Politburo members, perhaps as few as five or six, and usually only those based in Moscow, normally control the process. Says a Kremlinologist at the U.S. State Department: "There are no votes taken. They palaver until the consensus is reached." In the final hours of the decision, the military and the KGB may become more influential...
...values. She told a press conference in Moscow that she had not known "one single day" of freedom in the West. She declared that she had come back to the Soviet Union to rejoin the two children she had left behind in 1967. But her earlier denunciations of the Bolshevik revolution ("a fatal, tragic mistake"), her father ("a moral and spiritual monster"), the Soviet system ("profoundly corrupt") and the KGB (like "the German Gestapo") suggested that her return may have been a desperate, in a sense almost a suicidal...
...Chernenko shared the spotlight with Ustinov and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko at Andropov's funeral. Later, in the fall, Ustinov faded out of the picture. Soviet television viewers had fully expected to see him pass through Red Square to review the massed battalions on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in November, but he never appeared. According to the official medical bulletin last week, Ustinov had contracted pneumonia in October. Emergency surgery had to be performed to correct an aneurysm in the aortic valve. His liver and kidneys later malfunctioned, and he suffered a cardiac arrest last Thursday evening...
When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin chose Ustinov, who was then 33 years old and the director of Leningrad's Bolshevik Arms Factory, to supervise the evacuation of the defense industry to the east of the Ural Mountains. Stalin later rewarded Ustinov, whom he called "the Red-head," with the Soviet Union's highest civilian honor: Hero of Socialist Labor...
Though Kremlin leaders no doubt welcomed the return of the dictator's daughter as a propaganda victory, there would be no dancing in Red Square. Since her 1967 defection, Svetlana had frequently denounced the Soviet regime in books and interviews. She called the Bolshevik revolution a tragedy for Russia and characterized Stalin as "a moral and spiritual monster." Repudiating her Soviet citizenship, she ritually burned her passport...