Word: hitleritis
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Historians have applied ingenious psychoanalysis to Hitler. Now, in The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin (Counterpoint; 261 pages; $25), the author and translator Richard Lourie has found a grimly brilliant form in which to dramatize Stalin and his horrors...
...Autobiography moves between the late '30s (the Moscow trials, Hitler's incursions into Austria and Sudetenland) and Stalin's life story, which Lourie shrewdly reimagines--a biography enacted within a formula: Darwinism + Leninism = Stalinism. The tough little Georgian survivor, emerging from the Tiflis seminary as a militant atheist, took up petty crime and apprenticed himself not only to Vladimir Ilyich but also to "my hero, my model, my rival," Ivan the Terrible: "Ivan understood the great secret: Cruelty is the cutting edge of history. The deciding factor is always the greatest degree of cruelty most intelligently applied...
After 1945, Hitler's Germans replaced complicity with denial ("We didn't know!"). Stalin, while in power, achieved mass complicity by betrayal. People knew exactly what was going on, and informed on others to save themselves. The poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in the Gulag, said bitterly, "Stalin doesn't have to cut heads off. They fly off by themselves, like dandelions." Lourie has ingeniously captured the moment when the Soviet air was filled with dandelions...
...David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister --Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister --Mohandas Gandhi, father of modern India --Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet reformer --Adolf Hitler, German dictator --Ho Chi Minh, first President of North Vietnam --Pope John Paul II, religious leader --Ayatullah R. Khomeini, leader of Iran's revolution --Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights leader --Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union --Nelson Mandela, South African President --Mao Zedong, leader of communist China --Ronald Reagan, U.S. President --Eleanor Roosevelt, U.S. First Lady --Franklin Delano Roosevelt, U.S. President and New Deal architect --Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. President and environmentalist --Margaret...
...Movies --The Ugandan Space Program --The Titanic --The Edsel --Rocky 5 --Aerosol Cheese --Flowbee --Attacking Israel on Yom Kippur --AfterMASH --Shoe-Store X Rays --Geraldo's Opening of Capone's Vault --The Independent-Counsel Statute --Psychic Hotlines --Cold Fusion --The Maginot Line --George Lazenby As James Bond --The Hitler Diaries...