Word: stalinization
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Hemingway with Heartburn. A hulking, hardhanded man with a severe Stalin-style mustache, Gorky is best remembered for his grinding portraits of working-class life in the years immediately preceding the Russian Revolution. His plays and stories then could deal freely with the down-and-outers: barefoot bosyaki (hoboes) on the bum along Russia's great rivers; whores and thieves snarling "Ekh!" at one another in the dank cellars of Moscow; Lumpenproletariat in shiny leather jackets and dull despair. Gorky seemed a sort of Hemingway with heartburn...
First to be rehabilitated was Joe Stalin himself, whom Nikita had savagely pulled down in the official myth from demigod to scapegoat-devil. Two months ago, Kremlin spokesmen raised Moscow eyebrows by giving Stalin his due for helping Russia stem the Nazi tide. Next victim to be reprieved from obscurity was Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who showed up, replete with honors and ribbons, for last month's V-E-day celebrations in Red Square. Finally, after a decade in the doghouse, the wartime chief and "father" of the Soviet navy, Admiral Nikolai G. Kuznetsov, surfaced with the publication of excerpts...
Last week Moscow revealed it was even planning to reopen the ornate marble Stalin Museum in Gori, the dictator's birthplace in Georgia, where dust has been gathering on the mementos of his "personality cult" since the museum was closed...
...trend hardly signaled a return to Stalinism, but rather a judicious polishing of besmirched escutcheons. While crediting Stalin with victory in 1945, the Kremlin still rapped the old tyrant's knuckles for the defeats of 1941-42 and for the nation's general unpreparedness for Hitler's assault. Thus the latest issue of the Soviet Academy of Science's monthly journal notes that one reason Hitler was able to surprise Moscow was that Stalin ignored "detailed" reports from Soviet intelligence; moreover, his security police "instead of fighting the real enemies of the state, were used...
Died. Anton R. Zhebrak, 64, Soviet geneticist best known for his work on wheat hybridization, who was deposed in 1947 by Stalin's pet scientist Trofim Lysenko for insisting that hereditary characteristics cannot be modified by environment, but was since exonerated and accorded a glowing Pravda obituary ("A fine Communist, whose words never differed from his deeds"); in Moscow...