Word: bolshevik
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...Soviet military establishment, Holloway explains, grew out of the need to defend the young Bolshevik government against civil war and foreign intervention. When it became obvious that the Russian Revolution would not be followed by similar uprisings in the West, leaders of the Soviet Union quickly abandoned the Leninist concept of a people's militia in a well-equipped standing army that would ardently defend "socialism in one country." Upon accession to power, Stalin committed the Soviet Union to "catching and overtaking the capitalist countries." Holloway finds the early roots of the arms race. As he goes on to show...
Outside the Soviet Union, the KGB seems to embody Western fear and loathing of the Soviet system. Almost from its inception as an instrument of "revolutionary justice" following the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviet secret police, known successively as the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, MGB and, since 1954, the KGB, has been synonymous with terror and coercion. It brings to mind the worst excesses of the Stalinist period: the public show trials and confessions exacted through torture, the random arrests and midnight executions in the infamous Lubyanka prison. KGB "sleepers" penetrating to the heart of Western intelligence services...
...Felix Dzerzhinsky, an aristocratic Pole turned revolutionary, was the first head of the Soviet secret police, which was founded shortly after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution...
...yellow-and-white Council of Ministers building, they knew what they were there to do. They would ratify the choice already made by the Politburo, that of Yuri Andropov, 68, to be Brezhnev's successor as party chief. The post has been held by only five men since the Bolshevik Revolution: Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Georgi Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Shortly after noon Friday, Andropov, the son of a railroad worker from the northern Caucasus, became the sixth...
Born to a Russian peasant family in the Novgorod region, Romanov helped to defend Leningrad during the 900-day Nazi blockade in World War II. Eventually landing the top post of party boss in the city where the Bolshevik Revolution began, Romanov gained the admiration, and perhaps envy, of party colleagues for his success in revitalizing Leningrad's aging industry...