Word: stalinist
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Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 secret speech to the 20th Soviet Party Congress opened a debate among Marxists over how faithful Communists were to live with the truth that an estimated 20 million murders had been committed in their name by the Stalinist bureaucracy between 1934 and 1953. Khrushchev denounced Stalin as an evil genius who was able to seize control of the party by some terrible historical accident. Medvedev's view is less simplistic. He argues that in every social upheaval there is a fanatical fringe whose idealistic elements can easily be infiltrated by opportunists and criminals. Stalin...
...good grade of college humor, but it is a good deal more: the fond, wondering recollection of a double exile, a man separated by circumstance from his country and by a decade and more from his youth. (Author Cabrera Infante, 42, is a leftist who regards Castro as a Stalinist and a gangster, and now lives in London.) His book is a remarkably good novel of memory, and it is memory that splits the images and works the magnifications, producing the prose pratfalls, the crosscutting of parody and boozy interior monologue, the bits of trivia in two languages worn smooth...
...Soviet Writers Union did its best to keep his funeral quiet, but Nobel-prizewinning Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 53, whose novels (The Cancer Ward, The First Circle) have been banned in his homeland, made his first public appearance in several years to honor the man who had published his anti-Stalinist novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Solzhenitsyn did not speak, but his simple presence made Tvardovsky's funeral a testimony for cultural freedom. Earlier, Solzhenitsyn offered more outspoken testimony in the same cause. In a letter to Dr. Karl Gierow, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy...
...Stalinist days, Medvedev would have probably disappeared without a trace behind the walls of Lubianka prison. It is a measure of progress that Medvedev had only to endure obscene absurdities. Committees of psychiatrists tried to discredit his mind with such limp diagnoses as "poor adaptation to the social environment," and "obsessive reformist delusions." Such labels, as the Medvedevs note, could have also been pasted on Marx and Lenin...
...Yugoslavs pressed the Soviet leader for a clear-cut renunciation of the Brezhnev doctrine and reaffirmation of the Belgrade and Moscow declarations of the mid-'50s. These had ended the Stalinist campaigns against Yugoslavia by proclaiming the right of all Communist countries to find their own path to Marxism. Brezhnev gave his hosts some satisfaction by seeming to dismiss "the doctrine of limited sovereignty" as a "fabrication" by the West and pledging his own support of the old declarations. However, Brezhnev's assurances were semantically slippery. He said that the Belgrade and Moscow declarations had to be understood...