Word: stalinize
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...this century of horrors, the deadly concentration camps and prisons of Stalin in the '30s, relatively old-fashioned and bureaucratically cumbersome in their operation, were soon to be overshadowed by the smoothly functioning Nazi death camps and crematoriums of the '40s. But they were no less ruthless in quality for being more primitive and inefficient. Moreover, they existed on such a scale that ordinary Russians knew about them and stolidly accepted (or had to accept) the destruction of their fellow countrymen...
Journey into the Whirlwind is a deeply significant, lest-we-forget book. It recalls the days-and nightmares-of purges, when millions of innocent and apolitical Russians, caught up in the maelstrom of Stalin's paranoia, were brutally executed or jailed or swept across the continent into the slave-labor camps of Siberia...
Stick & Carrot. On Dec. 1, 1934, Sergei Mironovich Kirov, secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was assassinated in Leningrad. It was this event that Stalin chose to use as the excuse to rid himself of all potential opposition-real and imagined-and to inflict the cult of terror that would ensure his dictatorship...
During the Stalin period, most Russians managed to acquire an official self that they presented to all but their closest friends: they were Bolshevized into becoming suspicious, stilted and somber in their dealings with others. Today's less cruel but still existing repression, says Princeton Historian James Billington, "breeds exasperation and contempt more than terror." But if the Russian is somewhat more open now, he is still burdened by what University of Toronto Sociologist Lewis Feuer calls "socialist pessimism": the feeling that frustration, pain and deprivation are in the nature of things and that nothing can be done about...
Brezhnev and Kosygin are in agreement about liberalization in Russia, but Brezhnev takes ideology more into consideration and generally prefers a relatively tougher line. Kosygin is more practical and realistic and, though no liberal in the Western sense (both he and Brezhnev served time in Stalin's ca dres), is more or less looked to by the new intelligentsia as their best hope for further relaxation of party control. Suslov is more of a hardliner, while Podgorny has the strongest liberal tendencies of all. All four distrust the ambitious younger leaders, at whom they recently struck a blow...