Word: stalinize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Only children score better on IQ tests, reach higher levels of education and get more prestigious jobs than people with siblings. Look at Leonardo da Vinci, Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin. But there is a price for fame and glory. "Onlies" are associated with a host of irksome psychological traits -- among them impaired social skills and a nagging need for attention. Now it seems they may also suffer from a distinct physical handicap: higher blood pressure...
...large extent, the Soviet Union was originally constructed as a military enterprise. After taking power in 1917, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky quickly forged the Red Army to fight the White Russians. Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin, saw his first priority as building up powerful defenses to protect against "capitalist encirclement" and to preserve the "Socialist Motherland." Beginning with the first Five-Year Plan in 1928, industries were divided into A (military) and B (civilian) groups, with the A organizations having first call on all resources...
DARK STAR by Alan Furst (Houghton Mifflin; $22.95). Plot is less important in this impressive spy novel than description, the re-creation of the nightmarish tensions that erupted during the 1930s between Soviet NKVD agents and Stalin's Georgian thugs...
...Poetry: Wallace Stevens for his strange visual clarities, Robert Frost for his sly moral clarities, Walt Whitman for his spaciousness and energy. Some early Hemingway. I read the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam (Hope Against Hope; Hope Abandoned), the widow of Osip Mandelstam, a Soviet poet destroyed by Stalin. I look at The Wind in the Willows out of admiration for Mr. Toad and for what he has to teach about folly and resilience...
...prime time. Its p.r. director, Major General Alexander Karbainov, was in Rome last week to announce a joint Soviet- Italian production -- a 13-episode TV series to be called The KGB Tells All. It will cover such famous cases as the assassination of Leon Trotsky by one of Stalin's hit men and the defections of Kim Philby and other Britons who spied for Moscow. Preparations will take about a year, the producers say, and scriptwriters will be able to consult some secret material. The 90-minute docudramas will be filmed in Europe...