Word: stalinism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Back in 1947, as it became clear that Poland's Peasant Party would beat the Communists, Stalin's army cut off its phones and eventually sent the party's chieftain, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, fleeing to the West. In Hungary that year, after the anti-Communist Smallholders Party won power, the Soviet army arrested its leader and forced a confession of subversion...
...challenges that will arise from the fracturing of the Soviet bloc will help the U.S. avoid the unseemly tendency to gloat. But it should not obscure the epochal nature of the change occurring. Poland and Hungary are abandoning the basic tenets that Lenin distorted after Marx and that Stalin distorted after Lenin: a rigidly centralized economy, a one-party political system and a suppression of personal freedoms. People are electing their representatives for the first time. They are reading independent newspapers and starting their own businesses. They are even tearing down the fences that have kept the world...
Members of the dictator's entourage were always at risk. On Stalin's orders, the wife of Mikhail Kalinin was arrested and tortured while her husband continued to serve as the country's titular President. The wives of Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and of Stalin's personal secretary Alexander Poskrebyshev were also imprisoned. Meanwhile, the secretary endured other kinds of hell. "One New Year's Eve," Medvedev recounts, "Stalin rolled pieces of paper into little tubes and put them on Poskrebyshev's fingers. Then he lit them in place of New Year's candles. Poskrebyshev writhed in pain...
...could such a monster gain absolute ascendancy over the Soviet Union? In this book Medvedev backs away from his earlier position that Stalinism was essentially an aberration on the road to a more benevolent Communism envisioned by Lenin. The historian has re-examined the totalitarian system created by Lenin and now suspects that Stalinism sprang from Leninism, as many American Sovietologists have concluded. Though Medvedev never fully confronts this issue, he emphatically makes one crucial point: when Lenin banned all opposition groups and factions in 1921, the ensuing one-party dictatorship was "a very important condition for Stalin's usurpation...
BOOKS: A Russian historian updates the evils of Stalin...