Word: stalinize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Then, as now, all of Eastern Europe was in a state of nationalist turmoil. Only three years after the death of Joseph Stalin, Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev was trying to reform the brutal dictatorship that Stalin created, but each attempt at change triggered new disturbances. Khrushchev stunned the Communist Party Congress that February by his secret speech acknowledging for the first time Stalin's myriad crimes. That speech strengthened anti-Soviet dissidents throughout Eastern Europe...
...Paradigm is above all struggling toward a working model for the information age. The great totalitarianisms of the 20th century (Stalin's, Hitler's) depended upon the dictator's power to isolate the people and control their minds by controlling all information. The great work of inspiring the democracies also required heroic manipulations of image and information -- by F.D.R., by Churchill, for example. Such leaders gave an eloquence and resonance to the Old Paradigm -- a powerful accumulation of moral experience. It is possible to feel wistful sometimes for those profound frames of reference while wandering around in the New Paradigm...
...colleagues race to stop a renegade Iraqi colonel from launching a biological weapon against Israel. There are folks back at the agency to contend with as well: a new generation of computer jocks who disdain the old-timers, and a slimy acting director who longs for a new Stalin in the Soviet Union to "give us our enemy back...
When Shevardnadze arrived at the Stalin-gothic Foreign Ministry on Smolensky Square, he treated it as a candidate for cleanup. After 28 years under the proprietorship of dour-visaged Andrei Gromyko, the ministry badly needed perestroika and glasnost. Within a year Shevardnadze replaced nine of the 12 deputy ministers, instituted a daily press briefing, and created departments for disarmament and economic relations with the West...
Gorbachev and a whole generation of Sovietpoliticians who grew up under Stalin and now fillthe highest echelons of Soviet politics also don'tsee the humor in all this...