Word: stalinize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When the U.S.S.R. was born, there was a heated debate. Lenin was of the view that the Union should be a federation of equal republics, while Stalin in effect favored a unitary state. Lenin's approach was formally adopted in 1922, but in real life things turned out quite differently. It's only now that we are beginning to create a new Union in the original sense of that concept. A truly democratic multinational state and the progress of perestroika are mutually interdependent; each depends very much on the other...
Pavlov, 58, spent his childhood in Velikiye-Luki, a town of 100,000 people 250 miles west of Moscow. In 1938 his father, a Communist Party functionary, was accused of exploiting the area's peasants. He was imprisoned by Stalin's secret police, and his library at home was sealed. "I walked by that room every day," says Pavlov. "I will never forget." As soon as he could read, Pavlov pored through a tome on Stalin's 1930s trials. "From my father's experience, I knew that many had been unjustly treated," says Pavlov, who dates his distrust for dictatorships...
Pavlov remembers his early schooling as little more than a continual drill in Marxism-Leninism. "I recall one of my friends being asked to analyze a political point," he says. "Our teacher said that two of his three observations were correct because they accorded with Comrade Stalin's views. But the third deviated from the official line. The only explanation for my friend's heresy, the teacher said, was that the devil had taken over part of his brain. That's what school was like...
...flew to Moscow on April 1, bringing a typed copy of the essay. Historian Roy Medvedev came to see me that evening, and I exchanged it for the final chapters of his book on Stalin. Medvedev showed my essay to friends (which I had given him permission to do), and he passed on their comments. After making a few changes, I gave the manuscript back to Medvedev. He was going to produce a dozen or more carbon copies. Some, he warned me, might end up abroad. I replied that I had taken that into account. (We were communicating in writing...
...Without a strong hand, we could never have rebuilt our economy after the war or broken the American atomic monopoly -- you yourself helped do that. You have no moral right to judge our generation -- Stalin's generation -- for its mistakes, for its brutality; you're now enjoying the fruits of our labor and our sacrifices...