Word: stalinism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Gorbachev? It is not an easy question to answer: unhappily, glasnost does not yet extend to the life of its author. One reason, no doubt, is his wariness about encouraging a "cult of personality" -- the euphemism for glorification of an all-powerful leader, which reached sickening heights under Joseph Stalin in Gorbachev's student days and is thus associated in Soviet minds with Stalin's terror. Gorbachev has reacted to incipient hagiography in the Soviet press by being tight-lipped about his private life. Subordinates take their cue from the boss. A high official mentioned to a group of foreigners...
...time of bloodshed and terror. Stalin's drive to force Soviet peasants into collective farms was at its height. Those who resisted were deported or shot. Peasants destroyed animals rather than let them be confiscated by the collectives. That slaughter, along with the Soviet government's oppressive requisitions of grain from the newly formed collective farms, created a man-made famine that was raging when Gorbachev was born. Millions eventually died...
...even the repression of the kulaks (well-off peasants), who were deported or executed as class enemies. But perhaps because of boyhood memories, he has criticized the brutality shown to a less prosperous group, the so-called middle peasants. A classmate remembers that as a college student after Stalin's death, Gorbachev spoke of a middle-peasant relative who had been arrested and, the classmate assumes, shot...
...students had parents who were in political disgrace, he called for their expulsion from the Komsomol and perhaps from the university as well. Michel Tatu, a prominent French Kremlinologist and author of a forthcoming biography of Gorbachev, is convinced that he joined in the vicious anti-Semitic rhetoric of Stalin's last purge, launched just before the dictator's death in early 1953. Mlynar does not deny that, but he insists that Gorbachev steered clear of any individual persecutions...
...occasional drink)) and usually talk politics. Khrushchev's report on the crimes of the Stalinist era had recently appeared. The entire country was still reeling from shock." Maximov and others of Gorbachev's generation, however, remember the late 1950s as an exciting time. Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin at the 20th Communist Party Congress in 1956 briefly opened the way to a much freer atmosphere. It was a false dawn. Repression resumed a few years later. To this day, however, educated Soviets of Gorbachev's generation, whose political attitudes were formed then and who are now moving into positions...