Word: russianizing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Something New. Russia, long before the Bolsheviks, developed the sinister side of the policeman's role much farther than any democracy has to this day. The reason has an important bearing on Beria. The 19th Century Russian satirist, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, noted: "In every other country little boys wear trousers, but not our boys . . . everywhere else reason rules, but here only the whistle of the lash. . . . [In Russia] no independent form of social order [has] yet developed...
...make his own distinctly Russian substitute for a "form of social order," Czar Nicholas I (called "The Nightstick") in 1826 decided to create a new thing, a secret police which later came to be called the Okhrana (Guard). The inception of this dreadful institution took place in a scene of sentimental horror. When the Okhrana's first chief, Count Alexander Benckendorff, reported to the Czar for instructions, the monarch pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and said: "Dry the tears of the oppressed. May your conscience and the conscience of your subordinates ever remain as stainless as this...
...trusted to "keep order"? In a way, yes. An active Yezhov-type terror no longer stalks Russia. Most Soviet citizens go to bed at night without fearing that Beria's MVD will pound on their doors. This security, however, is bought at a terrible price. The Russian people live in a sort of "house arrest." They dare not shift from city to city in search of work. They do not talk or even think too long about how they are ruled. If they do, they are likely to join the 12,000,000 in Beria's labor camps...
Last week President Juho K. Paasikivi named his negotiators for the Russian pact. Four were proCommunists, but three had said that they opposed a military alliance with Russia. To those delegates reluctant to make the humiliating Kremlin visit, Paasikivi said: "There is no question of whether you have any desire to do this or that. This is compulsory labor...
...delegation was Communist Minister of Interior Yrjö Leino. His wife, lively 44-year-old Hertta Kuusinen (sometimes called Finland's Ana Pauker), is the daughter of Russian stooge Otto Kuusinen, President of the Karelo-Finnish Republic which Russia grabbed from Finland in World...