Word: stalinize
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...more theoretical level, perestroika has been attacked by conservative intellectuals who improbably combine a nationalist nostalgia for Russian Orthodoxy and the Stalin era with a xenophobic hatred of corrupt Western influences on Soviet life. Many of these critics belong to the Writers' Union of the Russian Federal Republic, the largest of the U.S.S.R.'s 15 constituent republics. The literary monthly Nash Sovremennik has denounced rock music and beauty pageants as demeaning influences on Russian culture. Such writers as Yuri Bondarev and Vasily Belov have attacked the de-Stalinization process for defaming a period when, despite Stalin's tyranny, the Soviet...
...bones were unearthed, along with paraphernalia of everyday life -- remnants of packed lunches, purses filled with kopecks -- indicating that the people had been snatched from their daily routines to be shot. With that, the truth became clear: from 1937 until the approach of Nazi invaders in 1941, Joseph Stalin's secret police had used the Kurapaty forest as a killing field. Estimates of the number of men and women buried there range from 30,000 to more than...
...other mass graves in the Minsk area and the Ukraine are occurring now. The exhumation constitutes a precise visual image of the Soviet Union's efforts to confront the horrors of its past. With Mikhail Gorbachev's approval, Soviet historians, scholars and journalists are metaphorically digging up evidence of Stalin's crimes and exposing those crimes in all their ghastliness to the light...
Rewriting history has long been a tradition among Soviet leaders. Stalin revised a history of the Communist Party to puff up his role in the Bolshevik Revolution. Nikita Khrushchev began the deflation of Stalin; Leonid Brezhnev converted Khrushchev into a nonperson; Gorbachev in turn has depreciated Brezhnev, causing his name to be removed from factories, cities and streets. As the joke goes, the Soviet Union is the only country in the world with an unpredictable past...
...Stalin's ghost is the most formidable opponent of almost every change that Gorbachev is trying to effect. It was Stalin who established the system of collective farms and the stifling central control of industry that Gorbachev is attempting to break up. And it was Stalin who punished independent thinking with such savagery as to smother the creativity of whole generations...