Word: stalinization
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Irina's trial was only the latest reminder of the Stalin era. The many hundreds of arrests of dissident intellectuals during the past four years have coincided with an official campaign to rehabilitate Stalin's wartime image. As the experienced reader of the Soviet press knows, every favorable mention of Stalin heralds some return to Stalinist methods by the authorities, including intimidation, denunciations, arrests and political show trials...
...most often young people like Irina Belogorodskaya, whose life story perfectly embodies the generational conflict between Stalinists and libertarians in Russia today. Irina was tried for possession of documents that quoted a political prisoner as saying that "present conditions in Soviet concentration camps are just as terrible as under Stalin." Among the few spectators allowed to attend her trial was a high-ranking officer of the organization that, among its other grim tasks, ran those camps for over 40 years. He was Colonel Mikhail Belogorodsky of the KGB, Irina's father...
...Hell Machine." For a time, Stalin thought of abandoning the city. Then, rather than let the Germans occupy it whole, he ordered that Leningrad's giant Kirov works, its railroad viaducts, its bridges, its ports, and all its historic buildings be mined for pushbutton destruction. But the button on what Leningraders referred to as Stalin's "hell machine" was never pushed. Nazi troops were drained off to other fronts, and enough Red Army units and citizen volunteers remained to keep the besiegers out. The Germans settled in, hoping to starve and shell the city to death. That they...
...inscrutable game played by history. Modest and matter-of-fact reporter Salisbury does not permit himself the luxury of such speculative indulgences. If he sees a shaping force in the tragedy of Leningrad, beyond Hitler's madness, it lies in the villainy and vanity of Joseph Stalin. For the Soviet dictator not only misjudged the course of events in 1941 and refused to arm his country adequately, he systematically falsified history and brutally suppressed the truth afterward to hide his own foolishness. Thousands of men associated with the siege years were killed or exiled in a savage, Kremlin-inspired...
...Kremlin was anxious to bury the memory of Leningrad's tragic, heroic wartime stand, its citizens were not. For nearly ten years, on Stalin's orders, coats of paint covered the blue and white signs that had sprouted on the Nevsky Prospekt and other major avenues during the siege, with the warning: "Citizens: In case of shelling, this side of the street is the most dangerous." Today, the signs have been repainted as they were. Touched up every spring, they stand as reminders of a past too terrible to be buried...