Word: stalinize
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...Socialist Labor, his country's equivalent of both the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Brezhnev's colleagues in the Politburo had even been known to refer to him as vozhd (roughly, great leader), a title previously given only to Lenin and Stalin. Privately, Soviets joked about the cult of personality that gradually surrounded their President as he fought against the inexorable frailties of old age. It was said, for example, that he had even outdone Stalin in the matter of mustaches by cultivating two of them, a reference to the bushy eyebrows that...
There were other similarities. As in Stalin's last years, Kremlin iconographers labored to hide the ravages of age and disease. His portraits were meticulously airbrushed to darken his gray hair, to erase his wrinkles, to sharpen his jawline. Sound engineers who monitored his broadcasts used electronic magic to mask his slurred speech, possibly the result of a stroke. The disguises fell through when Brezhnev was placed in the harsh glare of cameras that could not be controlled by party discipline. At his meeting with President Carter in Vienna in June 1979, he stumbled and nearly fell while descending...
...steel plant, worked for a time as a manual laborer and in 1923 joined the Komsomol, the Communist youth organization. After vocational school, one of his first jobs was to help supervise the distribution of land in the Urals that had been seized from peasants as part of Stalin's brutal collectivization program. Brezhnev became a member of the Communist Party in 1931 and subsequently an apparatchik holding a succession of dreary but important jobs that led to the post of deputy chairman of the local city government and finally to a regional party committee membership...
...policy. In 1964 he was a member of the conspiracy against his former mentor that forced Khrushchev into retirement. Brezhnev's reward: the high-ranking post of First Secretary of the Communist Party. In 1966 Brezhnev assumed the grander title of General Secretary that had been adopted by Stalin...
...first printing of 100,000 copies would vanish from the stores within 48 hours, and any magazine containing an Aksyonov short story, like his celebrated Halfway to the Moon, could count on the immediate sellout of a 2 million-copy press run. No other prose writer of the post-Stalin generation commanded such an impassioned following; no other offered a more radical departure from the standard Socialist Realist fare. His nonconformity came naturally. Aksyonov had been born an alien in the Soviet world. He was the child of Stalin's victims: his father Pavel, the former Communist mayor...