Word: stalinism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...decades. It grew and became stronger in the struggle with numerous enemies-the Trotskyites, the Bukharinites, the bourgeois nationalists and other inveterate enemies of the people . . ." But in his sensational last-day secret speech Khrushchev told the delegates that the phrase "enemies of the people" had been invented by Stalin to justify the liquidation of thousands, and that in the great purge the real Trotskyites et al. were so few in number that they constituted no opposition...
...familiar line of cold, grey faces atop Lenin's cold, red tomb, watching the Red Square parades pass by, one mustachioed figure was always seen quite close to Stalin. He was First Deputy Premier Lazar Moiseevich Kaganovich, onetime tanner's apprentice who became an able and ruthless administrator. Stalin was rumored to have married Kaganovich's sister Roza, though this has never been established as fact...
...Bolshevik, Kaganovich supported Stalin against Trotsky in the fight for power after Lenin died and was rewarded in 1930 with a Politburo seat and the first-secretaryship of the powerful Moscow Party Committee. It was in this job that he took under his political wing a mild-mannered and goateed young functionary named Nikolai Bulganin...
Always something of a maverick-he was the only Jew among top Soviet leaders to survive the purges-Kaganovich won Stalin's approval for his loyalty and toughness and got one top job after another. He played an important role in the party purges, was put in charge of the construction of the famed Moscow Metro and finally he became czar of Russia's railroads, a job that he pursued with such vigor during World War II that he instituted the death penalty for failure to make trains run on time. With responsibilities came rewards: his home town...
After the war Stalin gave him the vital Ministry of Building Materials, then rushed him off to the Ukraine to put out fires of rebellion that the local party boss, another Kaganovich protégé, Khrushchev, seemed unable to handle. Later in Moscow, Kaganovich was placed in charge of labor...