Word: stalinize
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Ever since Stalin's police chiefs conducted mass purges of government and party officials in the late 1930s, Soviet political leaders have regarded any overly ambitious security chief with suspicion. Still, if there is anyone who could persuade the Kremlin elite to put aside their apprehensions, Andropov may be the man. The reason: in his 15 years as KGB chief, Andropov has prevented the secret police from terrorizing the leadership as it did during the Stalin years...
...last week's move. Columbia University's Seweryn Bialer considers it unlikely that the Kremlin hierarchy will ultimately choose a former KGB chief as its head. "The political and military leaders do not want to live under the shadow of the secret police as they did under Stalin," he says. Dialer believes that if Andropov is selected, it will be a sign that the leaders believe that the Soviet Union and its empire are in deep trouble. "It will mean that they feel obliged to turn the screws tighter at home because of economic difficulties and in Eastern...
...rgen Syberberg's rendering of Wagner's Parsifal. Nearly five hours later they stagger out into the dawn's hazy light, exhausted and exhilarated. In midafternoon, Menahem Golan, the Israeli producer who now heads his own distribution company, sits on a teeming Carlton terrace flanked by Stalin-era-size posters of his stars: Faye Dunaway, Robert Mitchum, Brooke Shields, Lou Ferrigno. "I have sold a million dollars in film rights each day at Cannes," Golan purrs, but "I did better last month at the American Film Market in Los Angeles." Night falls, and for the assiduous epicure...
...history as in popular art, the general taste runs to horror shows rather than tragedy. How else explain the enduring fascination with Hitler's Germany and the continuing lack of interest in Stalin's Soviet Union? In the atrocity sweepstakes, Hitler runs a distant second to Stalin, who sanctioned the deaths of 20 million to 50 million of his countrymen. Nor can Nazism, a brutally simple triumph of the goons, touch the tragic complexities of Stalinism-a political torch fanned by the world's idealists while one avuncular pipe smoker in Moscow was wielding...
...element in particular stands out from Lottman's engrossing account of the pre-war years: the Left Bank's love affair with the USSR. Natively, like star-struck high schoolers, a whole generation of writers fell for Stalin's brand of communism. If anything, this affliction recalls the admiration for Hanoi many anti-Vietnam war activists expressed during the 1960's. Like so many Susan Sontags, the Left Bankers would make a pilgrimage to their Mecca--and return full of hope that France too would find...