Word: nikitas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hard edge returned when Nixon compared Gorbachev with two other Soviet leaders he had dealt with: "Unlike ((Nikita)) Khrushchev, he has no inferiority complex. He is totally confident, in command, and secure . . . Gorbachev is as tough as ((Leonid)) Brezhnev but better educated, more skillful, more subtle . . . Brezhnev used a meat axe in his negotiations. Gorbachev uses a stiletto. But beneath the velvet glove he always wears there is a steel fist...
Gorbachev did, however, fill in a few of Soviet history's most troubling blanks. Not since Nikita Khrushchev's now famous secret speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956 had a Soviet leader so emphatically denounced the atrocities of the Stalin era -- particularly the terror-filled 1930s, when millions of citizens were arrested or summarily executed, or starved to death as a result of forced collectivization. Declared Gorbachev: "The guilt of Stalin and his immediate entourage before the party and the people for the wholesale repressive measures and acts of lawlessness is enormous and unforgivable. This is a lesson...
...other ways too, Gorbachev cracked open new windows in the previously impenetrable wall of Soviet history. He partly restored the reputation of Khrushchev, who died in disgrace 16 years ago, following his ouster in 1964. "It required no small courage of the party and its leadership, headed by Nikita Khrushchev, to criticize ((Stalin's)) personality cult and its consequences and to re-establish socialist legality," Gorbachev told the 5,000 Soviet officials and foreign dignitaries assembled before him in the cavernous modern hall. Khrushchev, who tried to launch decentralizing reforms similar to Gorbachev's, had not been publicly named...
...debate is not only about the future but also about the past. Every Sunday at Moscow's newly reopened Novodevichy Cemetery, hundreds of curious Soviets wander among the gravestones, searching for a missing piece of history. The quest usually takes them to the jagged, black-and-white monument to Nikita Khrushchev or the haunting marble bust of Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva (the dictator is buried beside the Kremlin Wall). Since Gorbachev urged historians to fill in the "blank spaces" of the past, the pain of the Stalinist years is no longer a taboo topic...
CULTURE SHOCK comes to the cinema in Dark Eyes, filmed in both the USSR and Italy. Director Nikita Mikhalkov is Russian, while his actors and their dialogue are Italian. Based on several short stories by Anton Chekhov, the film stars that mainstay of Italian cinema, Marcello Mastroianni, as a womanizer (what else?). Russian in outlook but quintessentially Italian in its characterization, Dark Eyes is a unique and almost dizzying blending of the two cultures from which it is drawn...