Word: stalinist
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...prominent party, state and military figures." Shorn of its jargon, the statement means that the present collective leadership is not at all tempted to return to the principal feature of Stalinism: absolute one-man rule, reinforced by mass police terror. The men in the Kremlin well know that the Stalinist system would devour those who set it in motion again, as it once devoured tens of thousands of Stalin's colleagues. If Stalin's role as a World War II military leader is being upgraded, the object often is to correct the historical record by balancing the earlier...
...letter arrived at a time when the general diplomatic climate in Central Europe seemed to be improving. Until last week, Walter Ulbricht, the East bloc's most durable Stalinist, had appeared to be Europe's odd man out. Even as the Soviet Union and his other Communist allies arranged bilateral talks with Bonn, he went right on insisting that West Germany must recognize his regime as the price for any negotiations about lessening tensions. But last week, at Ulbricht's bidding, the East German Volkskammer (People's Chamber) unanimously passed a resolution empowering the government...
What was Ulbricht up to? Some diplomats in Bonn thought that he was cynically offering West Germany the kind of negotiations it could not agree to. More likely, however, the old Stalinist had been under some pressure from Moscow to adopt a more flexible approach and had responded by changing his tactics but not his ultimate goal of full diplomatic recognition for his half of Germany. A poll published in the illustrated magazine Stern last week showed that most West Germans were more inclined than a few years ago to grant much of what Ulbricht wants. According to the poll...
...Stalinist Crimes. Solzhenitsyn spoke in his own defense at the Ryazan meeting, which took place two weeks ago. The leader of the attack on Solzhenitsyn was a hack writer named Vasily Matushkin. He conceded that he had never read Solzhenitsyn's novels The First Circle and Cancer Ward, which are banned in the Soviet Union because they are a devastating portrayal of conditions in Stalin's concentration camps. Matushkin, however, contended that the West uses the books "to throw mud on our motherland." "How do you explain that they so eagerly print you in the West?" he asked...
...into some sort of depression. They are spreading panicky moods, as if our state and all of our society were facing some sort of bankruptcy from which there is no way out." Husak thereupon assured his listeners that he would be better for them than either of his predecessors, Stalinist Antonin Novotny or Reformer Alexander Dubcek. "We do not want to return either to the Novotny bureaucracy or the Dubcek anarchy," he said...