Word: stalinization
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...Soviet First Lady says she has long been anxious about the "fierce struggle now going on between loyalty and treachery" in the Soviet Union. In the book, actually an extended interview with Soviet writer Georgi Pryakhin, Raisa discloses for the first time that her grandfather was executed under Stalin, an experience that made her both fearful and contemptuous of apparatchiks who act one way "when it is to their advantage" and another when it is not. "Sometimes I feel that they are not faces but masks," she says. "And the masks will suddenly disappear and I can see quite clearly...
...think about the situation in reverse, you realize how ludicrous that idea is," he says. "Imagine that during the depression, [U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt '04] had approached Stalin and said, 'Give us $20 billion to create a larger state intervention.' The idea is laughable, obviously...
...announced its recognition of the Baltics and its members' intention to open diplomatic relations "without delay." At an emotional ceremony in Bonn, the foreign ministers of the three republics personally accepted Germany's recognition. The 1939 nonaggression treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union set the stage for Stalin's annexation of the Baltic states the following year. "It is only today," said Estonian foreign minister Lennart Meri, "that the last consequences of the Second World War have been done away with...
That would not have been an unfamiliar situation for the Soviet Union. Gorbachev has been the nation's most abstemious leader. Stalin was a hard drinker, and Khrushchev was known for making hasty decisions under the influence of alcohol. Brezhnev and his entourage loved nothing better than raising glasses and toasting "Na zdorovye ((to your health))." As vodka once fueled communist rule, so it has hastened its downfall. The American poet John Ciardi, who died in 1986, wrote prophetically about vodka...
...military power, which was measurable and matchable. Harry Truman, like most American pols, believed he could touch the soul of any man he sat down with after a couple of toddies. He came back from the Potsdam Conference in 1945 enamored of the new friend he called "Old Joe" Stalin. Then the cold war started, and Truman got a clear view of the dark heart of a fanatic communist...