Word: politburo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...that between 1934 and 1939 Stalin attempted to destroy the authority and power of the Soviet Communist Party by liquidating thousands of its leaders and tens of thousands of its minor functionaries. For 13 years there was no full meeting of the Central Committee and, according to Khrushchev himself, Politburo meetings were a sham. In its last years, the Stalin regime was a pure autocracy. Stalin ruled through a personal secretariat controlled by a "special sector" whose head was Malenkov. The famous names that ranked beside Stalin's in the Politburo and in the government ministries were those...
...most of European Russia to the Nazis. By the time the Russians, by a superhuman effort, had reversed the balance, the whole country was literally sick of autocracy. There were murmurs of dissent, attempts to guide Stalin along other paths. But the mysterious demise of a number of high Politburo-crats halted any defiance from on high. The result was, says Robert C. Tucker, who spent 5½years in the U.S. embassy in Moscow as an attache, an "inward migration'' of the Russian people. Boredom, cynicism, and mediocrity-what the NKVD called "formalism"-characterized almost all cultural...
...days, Stalin may have begun to see the essential weakness of his personal autocracy; in 1952 he called, for the first time since 1939, a congress of the party, reconvened the Central Committee and set up a 36-man Party Presidium (a new name for the Politburo) in which his favorite, Malenkov, had a prominent place. Was this a dying dictator's effort to reconstitute a party whose power he had all but destroyed? Or was it, as Khrushchev said, his way of seeking "younger" men who would do nothing "but extol...
Some distance down the line, for he had ascended to the Politburo at the top of the hierarchy a dozen years after the oldest hands, was Nikita Khrushchev. It is unlikely that Khrushchev had a personal apparatus powerful enough to catapult him into the general secretaryship of the party a fortnight after Stalin's death. The great institutions behind the struggle obviously settled for the ebullient little man from the village of Kalinovka in the region of Kursk because, at that step of the leadership crisis, Khrushchev had the advantage of a fairly new face, and being...
...accused of pursuing "their own economic policies." One after another, the Zhdanovites disappeared. Virtually the entire Leningrad party apparat led by Peter Popkov, Zhdanov's successor as city secretary, was silently liquidated. In Moscow the purge carried away a clutch of notables, including the youngest member of the Politburo, State Planning Boss Nikolai Voznesensky. Dozens were executed...