Word: stalinization
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Such a vast change of politicians and administrators has not occurred in the Soviet Union since the great purges of the late 1930s, when thousands of powerful bureaucrats were shot or dispatched to the gulag on Stalin's orders. This time, however, the scourge is not a paranoid and murderous dictator. It is old age. Most top officials in the country's ruling bodies are the same age as the majority of Politburo members: in their 60s and 70s. Roy Medvedev, the independent-minded Marxist historian living in Moscow, believes that younger men will move into top positions around...
Sovietologists who have analyzed the backgrounds of the rising generation of leaders have drawn a number of conclusions about them. Unlike their predecessors, the upcoming leaders entered politics after Stalin's death in 1953, thus escaping the paralyzing effects of mass police terror and participation in the dictator's crimes. As a result, they may be less fearful, more self-confident and assertive, than the Brezhnev generation. Though the younger men are completely loyal to the Soviet system, they are less suspicious and more curious about the outside world. Better educated than the old rulers, many of whom attended only...
...Soviet Union that his image was too tarnished for him to represent his country at home or abroad. A more important impediment Andropov had to surmount was the widespread fear of the KGB among Soviet officials who vividly remember the purges of party and government bureaucrats by Stalin's secret-police chiefs. Working for Andropov, however, was his record of efficiently crushing religious, intellectual and national dissent; he once dismissed the dissident movement as "a skillful propaganda invention." Yet at the same time, he managed to make the country's leaders feel secure from Stalin-like coercion...
Says Columbia University Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer: "In the 1980s the Soviet Union may pass through the worst period since the death of Stalin. Growth rates will be the lowest ever, and the population can expect a stagnating or even declining standard of living. The very stability of the social system may be in question." Observes Marshall Goldman, associate director of Harvard University's Russian Research Center: "There are problems everywhere in the economy. The Russians have to be thinking about what they fought the revolution for. They must be asking themselves, 'Was it worth...
Supreme power in the U.S.S.R. has changed hands only four times before. Vladimir Lenin died in 1924 and made way for Joseph Stalin, who died 29 years later, to be replaced briefly by Georgi Malenkov, who was outmaneuvered by Nikita Khrushchev, who in turn was ousted by Brezhnev in 1964. The changeovers in Moscow might as well have occurred on another planet. U.S. statesmen of those years had little understanding of what had happened, much less any anticipation of what was going to happen next, and still less any sense of what the U.S. could do about...