Word: stalinization
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When the Soviet ship Baltika throbbed into New York harbor one morning in September 1960, demonstrators on a chartered sightseeing boat waved placards: ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE; STALIN DROPPED DEAD. HOW ABOUT YOU? Nikita Khrushchev laughed and pointed. A few weeks later at the United Nations, a Philippine delegate gave a speech complaining about the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. Khrushchev astonished the General Assembly by taking off his brown loafer and banging it on the table as if it were a spoon on an infant's high chair, except that in this case the banging...
What did Kennedy expect? Khrushchev understood that style of statecraft. He had learned from the monster himself, sitting at Joseph Stalin's right hand--or in his savage vicinity--for decades as cheerleader, yes-man and ideological dogsbody: a "nice guy," as his Kremlin cronies called him, who cheerfully survived Stalin's almost recreational paranoia even when so many of the evil crew (including Yezhov and Beria) were led offstage and shot...
...life than on the side of death. The fascination of William Taubman's splendid new biography, Khrushchev, the Man and His Era (Norton; 876 pages), lies in tracking the abundantly human struggle in the man between his native humanity and the temptations of power and glamour. Early on, Stalin took a shine to young Khrushchev (some thought because Khrushchev was even shorter than Stalin). Between 1929 and 1938--the most lethal years of Stalinism, starting with the enforced collectivization that left some 10 million kulaks dead, and running through the Great Terror and the show trials of the late...
Lenin's early death opened the way for the horrors of Stalin. Would Lenin have stopped them? The latest scholarship reminds us that Leninism was a brutal philosophy. As historian Helene d'Encausse wrote in her 2001 biography, "On the threshold of death, Lenin had hardly changed": he never backed away from the one-party, one-ideology, fiercely self-protecting state. When asked once why a group of political foes needed killing, Lenin had replied, "Don't you understand that if we do not shoot these few leaders we may be placed in a position where we would need...
...greeted the liberators of Paris in 1944. But Saddam may be nurturing a World War II image of his own - the brutal battle for Stalingrad that broke the back of Hitler's offensive and decisively turned the tide of the war. (Saddam, being something of a student of Stalin, may also be encouraged by the fact that although Russians loathed their dictator, they fought bravely to defend their country from invasion - even if sometimes it was the guns pointed at their backs, rather than patriotic heroism, that prevented retreat.) Saddam can't seriously hope to repel the invasion...