Word: stalinization
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...reminiscences cover a period of more than 30 years, concluding a few months before Khrushchev's ouster. The first segment recounts Khrushchev's career under the man who ruled over the Soviet Union for most of that time: Joseph Stalin. Khrushchev's overall judgment: He was a man of "outstanding skill and intelligence. In everything about Stalin's personality there was something admirable and correct as well as something savage." Nevertheless, "there was unquestionably something sick about Stalin." Absolute dictators like Stalin, says Khrushchev, "consider it indispensable that their authority be held on high not only...
Khrushchev first met Stalin in 1925, when the younger man was elected a delegate from the Yuzovka party organization in the southern Ukraine to the 14th Party Congress in Moscow. By then Khrushchev had discarded his mother's intensely religious training, fathered two children, lost his first wife during the famine of 1921 and married his second, Nina. Khrushchev recalls how, the first morning after reaching Moscow, he tried to take a streetcar to the Kremlin, but didn't know which number to take and ended up getting lost. He took to skipping breakfast so that he could...
Khrushchev soon began hearing other reports about the disastrous effects of collectivization. But it was not until many years later that he realized the scale of the "starvation and repression which accompanied collectivization as it was carried out under Stalin." Long afterward, for example, he heard of a train that had pulled into Kiev filled with the bodies of Ukrainians who had starved to death. Some officials wanted to sound an alarm at the time, but none had the courage to confront Stalin. "We had already moved into the period when one man had the collective [leadership] under his thumb...
Lucky Ticket. Yet Khrushchev's own career skyrocketed, and by 1934 he was party leader of Moscow. One reason: Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva, who had been a fellow student at the Industrial Academy, was impressed by Khrushchev and told her husband about him. "Nadya," mother of Svetlana Alliluyeva, committed suicide in 1932. But her judgment of Khrushchev endured in Stalin's mind, a stroke of luck that the old Soviet leader readily acknowledges. In the years that followed, he says, "I stayed alive while most of my contemporaries, my classmates at the academy, lost...
...ourselves as artists of the future, we see ourselves as terribly serious utopianists or revolutionaries or rising young politicos or academics. Ken Kesey's letter to Tim Leary in Rolling Stone is as much the kind of supercilious grandstanding that Brooks is talking about as are Stalin's daughter's Twenty Letters to a Friend. David Susskind, Erich Segal and Andy Warhol are all part of the same American game. Everyone plays to the audience...