Word: stalinism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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During the quarter-century of Stalin's iron rule over the U.S.S.R., the dictator's birthday on Dec. 21 was cause for frenzied national jubilation. As Stalin grew older, Pravda and every other Soviet newspaper carried little else but good wishes to him from groups of factory workers and collective farmers, some of whom would double their production in his honor. But since the dictator's death in 1953, and especially since Nikita Khrushchev's famed destalinization speech three years later, few Soviet citizens have felt the urge to celebrate the birth of a tyrant whose...
...little doubt that his death was caused by a massive cerebral hemorrhage. But speculation has continued about Roosevelt's health in the last years of his life; any serious illness could have affected his performance in office and led to what many believe were unwise concessions to Stalin at the momentous Yalta Conference. Now a doctor has raised anew the suggestion that Roosevelt had terminal cancer, knew it, but chose to run for re-election in 1944 anyway so that the country, engaged in the war effort, would not be disrupted by a change in leadership...
Khomeini's demagoguery notwithstanding, even after that slaughter, the total number of the Shah's victims simply cannot be compared to the millions killed by Hitler and Stalin; nor can the tenor of his regime be likened to that of Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union. Even among contemporary despots, the Shah is not the worst. One prominent member of the International Commission of Jurists classifies the Shah as in a "second league" of tyrants, below Uganda's Idi Amin, Cambodia's Pol Pot and Central African Emperor Jean Bokassa...
...Washington. These would scarcely rate as revolutionary trophies. Philby, the only one of the four I knew at all well, he being my wartime boss at M16, never gave me an impression of having any serious intellectual interests. I regarded him as just an adventurer, who found in Stalin's very ruthlessness something to admire, as his father, St. John Philby, the Arabist, had found in King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. Anyway, his appalling stutter would have precluded any sort of Marxist dissertation: Marx spoken is bad enough, but Marx stuttered would be intolerable...
Ever since Christianity first reached it 1,100 years ago, the Ukraine has been strongly religious. Located southwest of Moscow, the region, with a population of 50 million, is agriculturally rich and deeply nationalist. In the 1930s Stalin all but crushed the autonomous Ukrainian Orthodox Church and in 1946 expunged Eastern-rite Roman Catholicism in favor of the more easily controlled Russian Orthodox Church. Even so, the Ukraine by official count still has 4,000 of the 11,000 Orthodox churches now open in the U.S.S.R.-only a fraction of the 53,000 churches in Russia before 1917. Protestant Ukrainians...