Word: pravda
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During the quarter-century of Stalin's iron rule over the U.S.S.R., the dictator's birthday on Dec. 21 was cause for frenzied national jubilation. As Stalin grew older, Pravda and every other Soviet newspaper carried little else but good wishes to him from groups of factory workers and collective farmers, some of whom would double their production in his honor. But since the dictator's death in 1953, and especially since Nikita Khrushchev's famed destalinization speech three years later, few Soviet citizens have felt the urge to celebrate the birth of a tyrant whose...
...100th anniversary of Stalin's birth last week, Pravda ran a major editorial that mentioned some of Stalin's crimes, including "serious violations of Soviet legality and wholesale reprisals." As a result, the paper said, "many distinguished Communist Party and government leaders, high-ranking military commanders, honest Communists and nonParty people had suffered, though they were innocent." But since Stalin's death, the Party had "resolutely eradicated the consequences of the cult of personality." Still, Pravda called Stalin a "distinguished leader" who had supplied a "need for centralized leadership, iron discipline and extreme vigilance" during most...
...Pravda's dual reaction to the centennial reflected the ambivalence of the present Soviet leaders, most of whom rose to power during Stalin's regime. As the dictator's surviving heirs in the Kremlin, they are reluctant to expose crimes for which they share at least moral responsibility. Thus sharp condemnation of Stalin ceased after Khrushchev's overthrow in 1964; since then, books and films have praised him as a great wartime leader. As for ordinary Soviet citizens, nearly half of whom were born after Stalin's death, a surprising number seem scarcely to have...
...American hostages. On the other hand, Soviet propaganda has done what it could to make mischief. At first the Soviet Farsi-language broadcasts, beamed from Baku into northern Iran, harshly criticized the U.S. These were toned down after Washington protested. But last week, in its harshest volley to date, Pravda accused the U.S. of trying to "blackmail Iran by massing forces on its frontiers" and said that Washington was turning the crisis into "one of the serious international conflicts of the postwar era." The U.S. protested that the Pravda editorial was "deplorable," and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance complained...
...assembly hall of the seminary in Odessa, portraits of metropolitans and archbishops on one wall stare at portraits of Politburo members facing them from the wall opposite. Copies of Pravda and Izvestiya are posted on bulletin boards, but the library has 25,000 theological works. Rector Alexander Khravchenko says there are 90 to 120 applications for 60 entering places each year, but the graduating class is the same size...