Word: stalinism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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With a chorus of critics—some legitimate, some not—ready to call every strong stance Summers takes an Orwellian lockdown of free speech at Harvard, it is no surprise that he has since said little. No one likes to be castigated as a Stalin of the academy. But his silence has been worse. Any strongly-worded statement on the war in Iraq would be sure to stir up healthy debate and controversy, whether by challenging the prevalent anti-war mood at Harvard or by standing up to the Bush administration and the majority of Americans. Whatever...
What did Kennedy expect? Khrushchev understood that style of statecraft. He had learned from the monster himself, sitting at Joseph Stalin's right hand--or in his savage vicinity--for decades as cheerleader, yes-man and ideological dogsbody: a "nice guy," as his Kremlin cronies called him, who cheerfully survived Stalin's almost recreational paranoia even when so many of the evil crew (including Yezhov and Beria) were led offstage and shot...
...life than on the side of death. The fascination of William Taubman's splendid new biography, Khrushchev, the Man and His Era (Norton; 876 pages), lies in tracking the abundantly human struggle in the man between his native humanity and the temptations of power and glamour. Early on, Stalin took a shine to young Khrushchev (some thought because Khrushchev was even shorter than Stalin). Between 1929 and 1938--the most lethal years of Stalinism, starting with the enforced collectivization that left some 10 million kulaks dead, and running through the Great Terror and the show trials of the late...
...practiced deception and self-deception. He never fully owned up to his complicity." Touching a chillingly familiar chord, Taubman explains, "His complicity in great crimes ... was tied to nothing less than his own sense of self-worth, to his growing feeling of dignity, to the invigorating, intoxicating conviction that Stalin, a man he came almost to worship, admired him in return...
...Stalin's pudgy Sancho Panza was the man who, in February 1956, delivered the famous four-hour "secret speech" to the party congress in which he set forth Stalin's crimes and began the complex, much delayed process of de-Stalinization. Out of guilt or common decency, he began to rinse the terror out of Soviet life. Writes Taubman: "His daring but bumbling attempt to reform communism began the long, erratic process of putting a human face (initially his own) on an inhumane system...