Word: politburo
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...made the Central Committee at 31, and the Politburo five years later, but the world knew little of him until 1939, when he succeeded Maxim Litvinov as Foreign Minister. Joking with General Charles de Gaulle years later, Stalin said: "You got the better of Molotov. I think we'll have to shoot him." De Gaulle records that Molotov turned green. By containing his moments of terror and allowing himself to be Stalin's whipping boy, Molotov not only lived, but achieved fame. Stalin named factories, cities, ports after him. And in Western dictionaries he will doubt less...
KHRUSHCHEV began his denunciation of Stalin by revealing two suppressed letters. One was written by Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, to Lev Kamenev, chief of the Politburo: "I beg of you to protect me from rude interference with my private life and from vile invectives and threats [by Stalin]." Lenin wrote direct to Stalin: "You permitted yourself a rude summons of my wife to the telephone and a rude reprimand of her ... I have no intention to forget so easily that which is being done against me ... I ask you therefore that you weigh carefully whether you are agreeable...
...enemy Beria, who had murdered thousands of Communists and loyal Soviet people . . . The question arises . . . Why did we not do something earlier, during Stalin's life, in order to prevent the loss of innocent lives? It was because Stalin personally supervised [the purges], and the majority of the Politburo members did not at the time know all of the circumstances . . . and could not therefore intervene...
...confessions from the doctors, we will shorten you by a head.' Stalin personally called the investigative judge, gave him instructions, advised him on which investigative methods should be used; these methods were simple-beat, beat, and again beat. Shortly after the doctors were arrested, we members of the Politburo received protocols with the doctors' confessions of guilt. After distributing the protocols, Stalin told us, 'You are blind like young kittens; what will happen without me? The country will perish because you do not know how to recognize enemies...
...Some comrades may ask us: Where were the members of the Politburo? Why did they not assert themselves? In the situation which then prevailed, I often talked with Nikolai Bulganin; once when we two were traveling in a car, he said: 'It has happened sometimes that a man goes to Stalin on his invitation as a friend. And when he sits with Stalin, he does not know where he will be sent next, home or to jail...