Word: stalinization
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During his lifetime, statues and pictures of Joseph Stalin blossomed across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union and its satellites. But after his death in 1953, the old dictator's successors ruthlessly turned against him. In a secret speech to the 20th Party Congress, Nikita Khrushchev in 1956 denounced Stalin as an egomaniac who employed mass terror and torture. Stalin was then efficiently erased from public view, and the exterior vestiges of his rule-statues, pictures, street signs -came tumbling down. Only in his native Georgia did his statues and pictures remain in place...
...case of Dr. Zhores Medvedev, a prominent Soviet geneticist who last month was locked up in a mental institution. Nine months ago Medvedev lost his job as head of a radiological institute in Obninsk. Reason: the publication in the West of a book, in which he charged that Stalin's pet scientist, Trofim Lysenko, had thwarted the advancement of Soviet biological research. Medvedev attacked Lysenko for distorting facts for political reasons, and for imposing "demagoguery and intimidation" on Soviet science, leading to "scientific bankruptcy." In line with Communist ideology, Lysenko taught that environmental surroundings have greater significance...
Churchill liked to relax with a hot water bottle wrapped in a panda cover. Stalin had thin, sloping shoulders and achieved his robust look with a padded military greatcoat. George Bernard Shaw teased Nancy Astor about her boyish bosom. Such are the recollections in Memories, the just-published autobiography of Biologist-Author Sir Julian Huxley, 76. And how would Sir Julian himself like to be remembered? "Not primarily for my specialized scientific work, but as a generalist; one to whom, enlarging Terence's words, nothing human, and nothing in external nature, was alien...
...believe that the present Soviet leaders, despite their problems with economic shortcomings and political dissent, plan to reinstate Stalin's brutal fist as well as his statues. Official Soviet histories continue to condemn his political "excesses" during the Great Purges of the 1930s. The more likely explanation for his current limited elevation is that the regime's major military figures want to build up their roles in World War II-and they can hardly avoid upgrading their wartime leader in the process...
...Moscow. As ardent a Communist as her husband, she climbed the Soviet bureaucracy, first as director of a perfume factory, later as head of the cosmetics trust. In 1939, she became one of the first women to achieve Cabinet rank as Minister of Fisheries. She fell into disfavor with Stalin, lost her job and was exiled for a time-even though her husband remained one of the dictator's most important henchmen...