Word: stalinization
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...career of Author Ilya Ehrenburg, 74, spans the history of modern Russia from Czardom through Lenin's Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin's years of terror, and the gentler years of the old killer's successors. Ehrenburg managed to survive it all by saying just enough of the right things and keeping a discreet tongue about the wrongs around him. Last week, in the final chapters of his rambling memoirs, People, Years, Life, Ehrenburg reminisced on the darker side of the Stalin...
...would just like to explain to the readers why I did not like Stalin," he wrote, because "a new generation is growing now that knew nothing of the stormy applause [for Stalin] and the nights when we listened for the noises on the stairs. I realized that Stalin, in his nature and favorite methods, resembled the politicians of the Italian Renaissance...
...Among those who perished were my close friends, and nobody would succeed in convincing me that they were traitors. Sergei Eisenstein [the famous Soviet movie director] told me of his meetings with Stalin, who spoke of the necessity to extol Ivan the Terrible and added that Peter the Great didn't cut off enough heads." Summing up his thoughts about Stalin, Ehrenburg says: "If he just read the list of all his victims, he would not have been able to do anything else...
When Nikita Khrushchev opened the gates of Stalin's concentration camps and set free hordes of political prisoners, he proudly boasted that "only lunatics" could object to life in Russia. So it seemed only logical for Nikita to deal with the intellectual critics of his own regime by locking them up not in harsh prisons-but in lunatic asylums. As men in white coats largely replaced the policemen, hundreds of writers, artists and other outspoken objectors to Communism vanished from the Moscow scene, to reappear in psychiatric hospitals as "mental cases...
Socialists & Schlag. Vienna's working classes used to be among the Continent's most militant (both Trotsky and Stalin studied there), but with full employment and extensive welfare benefits. Dr. Gunther Nenning, editor of Austria's intellectual weekly Forum, reports that today the proletariat "is taking on characteristics of the bourgeoisie." It is common to hear such refined expressions as "küss' die Hand," (I kiss your hand), or "hab' die Ehre" (I have the honor) for salutations in butcher shops. The Communist vote has dropped to virtually nothing, while the Socialist Party, which...