Word: lenin
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...agents, once their work is done, are lionized in the U.S.S.R. Richard Sorge, a German who spied for Joseph Stalin in Japan during World War II, is honored on a postage stamp. Rudolph Abel, one of the most notorious Soviet agents of the '50s, was awarded the Order of Lenin after he was traded for U-2 Pilot Francis Gary Powers in 1962. KGB anniversaries are occasions for rallies and testimonials. "The competent organs," a common euphemism for the intelligence services, make up a kind of superelite. For years it was a basic tenet of Kremlinological wisdom that the head...
Forty years after their victory over Germany, aging veterans of the Soviet Union's struggle in World War II paraded past the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square last week, their chests bedecked with medals, the flag that Soviet soldiers had hoisted over the ruins of Berlin in 1945 leading the way. Young soldiers wearing World War II Red Army uniforms followed, carrying vintage rifles and submachine guns. Behind them, enveloped in clouds of white diesel smoke, rumbled armor and artillery from the '40s: T-34 tanks, SU-100 assault guns and truck-mounted Katyusha rockets once known as "Stalin organs...
...thing the West does know about the Soviet Union is that the people who run it cling to their posts either until their comrades turn against them and throw them out, as happened with Georgi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev, or until Comrade Death intervenes, as occurred with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and, last week, with Konstantin Chernenko. One of the more ironic flaws of the Soviet system is that while it is dedicated to the acquisition, consolidation and extension of power, while it prides itself on discipline and the subordination of the individual to the institution...
...coffin was lowered into a plot on the Kremlin Wall terrace, opposite to where Brezhnev and Andropov are buried. As the national anthem sounded, the red and gold hammer-and-sickle flag above the Kremlin was hoisted back to full staff and troops marched briskly past the Lenin Mausoleum to the sounds of a military march. The old era had ended...
Such incidents are being closely examined for what they reveal about Gorbachev, a stocky, balding man with a wine-colored birthmark on his forehead.* Trained as a lawyer, he is the first Soviet leader born after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the best educated since Lenin. His speech underscores his upbringing: his mastery of Russian grammar is superior to that of most of his Kremlin predecessors. He is the exemplar of the New Guard, which represents a generation raised after the Stalinist horrors and for which the catastrophe of World War II is an adolescent memory. Though much about Gorbachev...