Word: stalinist
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Those who knew Gorbachev as a young party activist agree that he was a true believer among cynical careerists. He had some reservations about particular policies, but when he spouted the Stalinist line of the moment, he did so with evident conviction. Lev Yudovich, who graduated two years ahead of Gorbachev, recalls having the young ideologue pointed out to him as someone to fear. There was reason to be wary of him: Neznansky asserts that when Gorbachev discovered that some fellow students had parents who were in political disgrace, he called for their expulsion from the Komsomol and perhaps from...
...year of Gorbachev's graduation, the Stalinist ice had broken in the Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev had taken over and was winding down the terror. Ghostly figures began drifting back into Moscow from the labor camps. But at the start of this period of ferment and change, Gorbachev removed himself and Raisa from the relative sophistication of Moscow and returned to the Stavropol area, where he was to stay for the next 23 years. According to Neznansky, the young graduate tried for a position with the Moscow Komsomol apparatus but lost out to a classmate and had little choice...
...paper's offices for a chat. "He would sit down with us in a casual manner," says Maximov. "We would uncork a bottle of wine ((for all his antialcoholism campaigning, Gorbachev still enjoys an 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...
Those policies include a population-resettlement program, the opening of Soviet-style collective farms and a "villagization" effort that moves farmers off their isolated homesteads and into government-built settlements. The collective farms are such a doctrinaire Stalinist scheme that even the Soviet Union has urged officials in Addis Ababa to scale back their ambitious plans...
...Westerner who doubts that things are changing in the Soviet Union, Tengiz Abuladze's Repentance will come as a shock. The 2 1/2-hour film, which was first released in Moscow a year ago and opened in the U.S. last week, is a powerful denunciation of the Stalinist-style police state and all its horrors: personality-cult paranoia, official corruption, institutionalized mendacity, arbitrary arrests and executions, dehumanizing labor camps. That Abuladze was ever allowed to make this film is remarkable. That it has been shown to millions of ordinary Soviet citizens, many of whom greeted it with standing ovations, is astounding...