Word: sovietizing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Irina's trial was only the latest reminder of the Stalin era. The many hundreds of arrests of dissident intellectuals during the past four years have coincided with an official campaign to rehabilitate Stalin's wartime image. As the experienced reader of the Soviet press knows, every favorable mention of Stalin heralds some return to Stalinist methods by the authorities, including intimidation, denunciations, arrests and political show trials...
...victims are most often young people like Irina Belogorodskaya, whose life story perfectly embodies the generational conflict between Stalinists and libertarians in Russia today. Irina was tried for possession of documents that quoted a political prisoner as saying that "present conditions in Soviet concentration camps are just as terrible as under Stalin." Among the few spectators allowed to attend her trial was a high-ranking officer of the organization that, among its other grim tasks, ran those camps for over 40 years. He was Colonel Mikhail Belogorodsky of the KGB, Irina's father...
Like Western Europe, Eastern Europe is pulling apart. It is torn by resurgent nationalism and the desire to trade with the West. These trends run directly counter to the interests of the Soviet Union, which seeks to dominate the bloc's economic activities through Comecon, the Communist equivalent of the Common Market, and to control political developments through Moscow-dominated Communist parties. But Comecon is a failure, and the Soviet attempt to impose its will on Czechoslovakia now appears to have created more problems than it solved...
Spring Maneuvers. By their invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Soviets arrested, for a time at least, the spread of liberal reforms and forced the country to return more or less to the practice of orthodox Soviet-style Communism. But the Soviets failed in their broader goal of imposing unity on the divided bloc. That failure, along with the defection of the West European Communist parties, is sure to cause further reverberations if the oft-postponed world Communist summit actually does convene in May in Moscow...
...invasion, in fact, only widened the schisms in Eastern Europe. After an initial period of intimidated silence, the Rumanians, the only active Warsaw Pact members that did not participate in the invasion, have become more outspoken than ever against Russian domination in Eastern Europe. Displeased, the Soviets in turn are pressing to hold Warsaw Pact maneuvers in Rumania this spring. Last week Soviet Marshal Ivan Yakubovsky, the Warsaw Pact commander, and Soviet First Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily Kuznetsov, until recently the Russian viceroy in Prague, visited Bucharest for a chat with Rumanian leaders...