Word: stalinize
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What a change! For decades, while Soviet leaders went about the business of state, their spouses remained virtually invisible. The wives of Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Chernenko rarely appeared in public. It was not known for sure that Yuri Andropov even had a wife until she showed up to mourn him at his 1984 funeral...
...Diplomat and Historian George Kennan, the father of the doctrine that the U.S. and its allies must "contain" Soviet expansionism around the globe, had another explanation. They believed that Leonid Brezhnev and the other Kremlin gerontocrats were seeking a buffer zone against Islamic ferment in Iran, much as Joseph Stalin had erected the Iron Curtain to protect the U.S.S.R. against its enemies in the West after World...
Whatever the motivation, Soviet expansionism was widely seen as a major threat to vital Western interests and world peace. Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union, like Stalin's, would not feel entirely secure until all other nations felt entirely insecure. Predatory or paranoid, the old men in the Kremlin seemed determined to continue playing the "Great Game" much as Rudyard Kipling had described it a hundred years before, when Czarist Russia and the British Raj maneuvered for influence among the tribes of the Hindu Kush...
...daily, has been providing much livelier reading lately, as policies are debated in prominently displayed letters to the editor. In the latest round, the newspaper last week gave front-page play to a letter that included a sweeping condemnation of the party's record of dictatorship and repression under Stalin. The missive cited a failure to restrain "princelings who exceeded their authority...
When the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya published a letter six weeks ago defending Stalin's rule and suggesting that glasnost was leading to "ideological mishmash," suspicion immediately fell on Ligachev as the instigator, if not the author. (The letter was ostensibly written by a Leningrad chemistry teacher...