Word: historians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Medvedev likes to quote another historian, Jules Michelet, who defined his profession as "the action of bringing things back to life." Scarcely anyone does that better than Medvedev. All existing portraits of Stalin, even one drawn by a great novelist like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, seem bland in comparison with the real-life killer who charges through the pages of Let History Judge. Although the statistics amassed by Medvedev are overwhelming -- he conservatively estimates that no fewer than 5 million Soviet citizens were arrested from 1936 through 1938 -- it is the telling human detail that brings alive Stalin's wickedness...
...could such a monster gain absolute ascendancy over the Soviet Union? In this book Medvedev backs away from his earlier position that Stalinism was essentially an aberration on the road to a more benevolent Communism envisioned by Lenin. The historian has re-examined the totalitarian system created by Lenin and now suspects that Stalinism sprang from Leninism, as many American Sovietologists have concluded. Though Medvedev never fully confronts this issue, he emphatically makes one crucial point: when Lenin banned all opposition groups and factions in 1921, the ensuing one-party dictatorship was "a very important condition for Stalin's usurpation...
Medvedev's assertions point straight to Gorbachev's fundamental problem: how to realize the "democratization" he has proclaimed within the totalitarian institutions of the one-party Soviet state. Unfortunately, it is not in the power of even so perspicacious a historian as Medvedev to resolve that fateful dilemma. Perhaps that is why he has become, at 63, a fledgling parliamentarian...
...system. The result, two months ago, was a genuine choice for voters in the election to the new Congress of People's Deputies. Numerous standard-bearers of the old order were defeated, including some who ran unopposed (they gathered too few votes to qualify for election). A prominent Soviet historian, Leonid Batkin, asserts that "the Communist Party lost as an institution. Communists won not because they were Communists but despite being Communists." The insurgents suffered a setback in last week's election of a new parliament, or Supreme Soviet, but Gorbachev still intends that body, over time, to serve...
...jumper," as he describes himself, guiltily plowed through Dostoyevsky and corresponded with his wife Mimi. "The Times felt like an insurance office," he observes. "Writing a 600-word story seemed to be considered a whole week's work." Meyer Berger, the paper's star feature writer and house historian, put the situation in perspective: "Mister Ochs ((Adolph Ochs, publisher from 1896 to 1935)) always liked to have enough people around to cover the story when the Titanic sinks...