Word: stalinism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Changing Masters. In the struggle for position after Stalin's death, Mikoyan showed supreme agility. He joined in the gang-up on Beria. As the original consumer-goods man he ought to have found Malenkov's breathing-spell policy congenial. But his shrewd nose for tactics told him not to commit himself to Malenkov. Although First Party Secretary Khrushchev might have seemed to Mikoyan a clodhopping countryman, Khrushchev had one prime quality that Mikoyan valued-political skill. Khrushchev could handle himself well in party scraps, and alone among Soviet leaders he could talk to the people. Outwardly...
Down with Stalin. At the 20th Party Congress last year, it was Mikoyan who made the first forthright anti-Stalin speech. Presumably this was a maneuver planned ahead of time with Khrushchev's connivance to set the stage for the sensational speech by Khrushchev that followed. Yet such are the intricacies of Kremlin politics that the one innocent victim of Stalinist slaughter cited by Mikoyan was Ukrainian Old Bolshevik Stanislav Kosior, whose successor in Kiev, as everybody in the hall knew, was the keen young Stalinist Nikita Khrushchev...
Doubtless Mikoyan felt as strongly about Stalin's tyranny as anybody. "You understand," he told Author Louis (Russia Revisited) Fischer last year, "Stalin held us in his hand. Only one escape was left to us-what Ordzhonikidze did when he committed suicide. I stood before the same decision. And at the end of Stalin's life I was about to be executed. Now we have changed all this. Now we want to be left alone to build...
Instead, having survived Stalin and then become the first to denounce him, Mikoyan has to be careful not to let the repudiation of Stalin get out of hand: the desire for revenge could easily devour all those who served him. Mikoyan was in the Kremlin group that flew to Warsaw last fall to smash the insurgent Gomulka -and found themselves encircled in Warsaw's Belvedere Palace by Gomulka's forces and compelled to agree to the Poles' demands. He was in the thick of the Hungarian action, where his slick manipulation was not enough: it took...
...Asian." The last of the old Stalin gang to surrender his Kremlin apartment (he moved out grumblingly in 1955), Trader Mikoyan no longer goes daily to any of his Moscow offices. Though trade is so basic in his background that it is primarily still his responsibility, he has graduated from the management of domestic enterprise to become Khrushchev's senior adviser and fixer. "He has no strong beliefs," says one longtime British observer. "He operates against a background of Marxism the way a Western politician operates against the background of Christianity." Mikoyan once said to a friend...