Word: kremlins
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...early teens, Mikhail Soloviev served as mascot to Budenny's Red cavalry. Later he was sent to school to be molded into one of Stalin's new Soviet leaders. He became a writer for Izvestia, the government paper, first as Siberian correspondent and then as Kremlin reporter. Soloviev got to know most of the big shots, including Big Brother himself, but when the purges came, he was fired and packed off to an outlying province...
Back in Moscow, Mark Surov is assigned a minor Kremlin post. His heart has turned away from the inhuman regime, but what to do next he does not know. The great purges are beginning; fear floods the city. When Mark invites friends to a party, he must inform the NKVD so that it can send an extra guest...
When he goes to the third floor of the Kremlin, he must always turn to the right -Stalin's office is on the left. Once, Mark sees Stalin publicly humiliate Old Bolshevik Volkov in accents of pretended joviality. ("Still alive, old fellow? But creaking? Don't worry; an old tree creaks a long time before it snaps, doesn't it?") Mark dreams of assassinating the Beloved Leader, but Volkov dissuades him: "The point is not to kill Stalin, but to destroy his system." "Deny It." In describing the purges, Novelist Soloviev throws in some sensational details which...
...Shinwell] would no doubt wish." "Withdraw!" bawled the Labor benches at this slur on Shinwell's patriotism, but the Prime Minister's dander was up. Instead of withdrawing, he recklessly peppered the air with further opprobrium: an ambiguous reference to "cosmopolitanism," which is a word the Kremlin likes to hurl at Jews. Laborites booed and hissed as Churchill started to stride out of the House. "Is it in order to boo a member of this House?" he demanded truculently. A scathing Scottish voice gave his answer: "What else can you say to a goose?" Now came cries from...
...searching or reflective but nearly good enough to set beside Witness was Austrian Physicist Alexander Weissberg's The Accused, one of the best accounts yet of what happened to victims of the Kremlin purge in 1937. And those who still doubted the Communists' double-dealing in the Spanish Civil War could read George (Nineteen Eighty-Four) Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, posthumously published in the U.S., one of the best books yet written about that tragic episode...