Word: stalinist
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Though the thoroughly Stalinist North Korea does not actually have a Kremlin, outside experts find themselves employing the oblique methods once used to evaluate Soviet politics to plumb the oddities in Pyongyang. Who is standing next to whom? What are the editorials hinting? Is Kim the successful successor or under challenge? These are not mere academic concerns when the U.S. needs to get on with talks about curbing North Korea's atom-bomb program...
...countries feel their way toward freedom -- and the booming American trade with other Marxist regimes. Washington is moving toward full trade and diplomatic ties with Vietnam, whose human-rights record is no better than Cuba's. It is holding extensive talks with North Korea, the worst troglodyte of all Stalinist regimes. And when Bill Clinton extended most-favored-nation tariff treatment to Beijing last May, he argued that "the best path for advancing freedom in China is for the United States to intensify and broaden its engagement with that nation." Why shouldn't he treat Cuba the same...
...where Dmitri Polyakov is buried -- or how he died. When sentenced to what Russians euphemistically refer to as vyshaya mera -- the highest measure of punishment -- the condemned person is taken into a room, made to kneel, then shot in the back of the head. It was part of the Stalinist tradition. To save his country from that legacy, Polyakov chose to betray its rulers. And betrayed by another betrayer, he lost his life...
Grant at least this much to Kim Il Sung: he certainly knew how to go out with a bang. The last Stalinist dictator managed to die just when the parts of the world most unsympathetic to him would miss the ultimate totalitarian the most. A god-king to his own people, a monster to those he waged war on and a riddle to almost everyone else, the only leader that communist North Korea has ever known perished at such a delicate point of diplomacy that even his sternest ill-wishers were praying that it was not true. Late last week...
...whirlwind transformed Russia into the Soviet Union, the poet Marina Tsvetayeva described her native city as a vast hostelry of "forty times forty" churches, where small pigeons rose above the golden domes and the floors below were polished by kisses of the faithful. Under the Soviet regime, with its Stalinist housing bunkers and oppressive military bearing, the city became a grimmer place, but one that was anchored, orderly, predictable, even if, to many outsiders, drab and downcast. By 1976, the British journalist Geoffrey Bocca could describe the scene as a "crushing concatenation of faceless, shabby, shoving, rude and, above...