Word: sovietizing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Communists have spent years and millions telling the world that the "excesses" of the Soviet regime were to be accounted the inevitable evils of a violent transition. For such a period, fanatics like Dzerzhinsky and Yezhov were inevitable choices as wielders of the purifying pistol. The transition, however, obviously ends...
...Politburo meeting, he contradicted Stalin on a minor matter. The Leader suddenly (and for the first time on such an occasion) let go with several frightening Georgian curses. Dzerzhinsky suffered an apoplectic stroke and died. The Soviet press always refers to him as "Fearless Knight of the Revolution...
...seems to be a sane, well-balanced man. In that fact lies the deepening horror of Russia. For Beria, without shrieks or dark yearnings, plods along, like the efficient bureaucrat he is, in the bloody footsteps of Dzerzhinsky. Some time ago a former Communist explained: "The task of the Soviet government is to create a new man with a new 'morale,' according to which it will be as easy to kill on the party's orders as to drink a glass of water." Beria, who was under 20 when the revolution broke, is that...
Beria; he is the normalcy of the Soviet state. Has he established a society whose normal members can be 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...
...Prison." Beria, of course, has an office in the Kremlin; but he does most of his work in Lyubyanka Prison,* not very far from the tomb of Lenin, who said he would make a state without crime, police or prisons. In the old hopeful days it was called the "Soviet Home for Those Who Have Lost Their Freedom." These days, it is frankly known as Lyubyanka Prison, for, as an eminent Soviet journal wrote in a campaign against squeamishness: "A prison is a prison." On his rare public appearances with other Soviet big shots, Beria usually seeks out Georgy Malenkov...