Word: stalinize
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Gromyko provides scant detail about the six major Soviet leaders under whom he served. He calls Joseph Stalin a "cruel man" who "created a monstrous ) tyranny," a view consistent with the latest winds of glasnost, but he refuses to condemn Stalin's terror outright. One of the most revealing anecdotes in the book is Gromyko's account of a telephone call he received from Konstantin Chernenko one day in 1985 in which the ailing Soviet leader asked whether he should resign because of ill health. "There's no need to hurry," Gromyko cautioned. Three days later Chernenko was dead...
...city of Brezhnev, on the Volga River, returns to the far more poetic Naberezhniye Chelny (Dugout Canoes on the Riverbank). The Moscow suburb of Brezhnev is once again Cheryomushky Rayon (Cherry Tree District). In Leningrad, Brezhnev Square reverts to the Krasnogvardeiskaya Ploshchad (Red Guards Square). Not since Joseph Stalin's name was wiped from the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) and the country's highest mountain (now Peak of Communism) in the late 1950s has a Soviet leader been so posthumously disgraced. No word yet on whether the nuclear-powered icebreaker, the cosmonaut-training center, the military academy, the power...
...that he gets angry with women for having ambitions higher than cooking for their husbands, or the civil rights movement for not understanding his "Negro problem." But now, Podhoretz is angry with someone you'd think he'd be partial to--a Jewish poet who escaped the evils of Stalin...
...students had parents who were in political disgrace, he called for their expulsion from the Komsomol and perhaps from the university as well. Michel Tatu, a prominent French Kremlinologist and author of a forthcoming biography of Gorbachev, is convinced that he joined in the vicious anti-Semitic rhetoric of Stalin's last purge, launched just before the dictator's death in early 1953. Mlynar does not deny that, but he insists that Gorbachev steered clear of any individual persecutions...
...occasional drink)) and usually talk politics. Khrushchev's report on the crimes of the Stalinist era had recently appeared. The entire country was still reeling from shock." Maximov and others of Gorbachev's generation, however, remember the late 1950s as an exciting time. Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin at the 20th Communist Party Congress in 1956 briefly opened the way to a much freer atmosphere. It was a false dawn. Repression resumed a few years later. To this day, however, educated Soviets of Gorbachev's generation, whose political attitudes were formed then and who are now moving into positions...