Word: stalinize
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...were around. Winston Churchill, bad boy of British politics, had just put out a book titled Amid These Storms about the unhappy drift of the democracies. Adolf Hitler was in the vestibules of German power and would pre-empt the inner sanctum come January of the next year. Joseph Stalin had the Soviet state in the palm of his hand. In sum, all the leaders who would contrive the shape of the midcentury world were now on stage -but little noticed. But the agonized present was enough for the American mind. The country's main concern was to stay...
Today, even if the "Polish disease" does not immediately infect the other satellites, the Kremlin has reason to worry about the cohesiveness of its colonies. Since the end of the Stalin era, the countries have developed in differing and, for the Soviets, sometimes troubling ways, guided by their own historic and cultural traditions. Rumania, although it has one of the East bloc's most repressive regimes, has maintained a boldly independent foreign policy. Hungary, while hewing to the Soviet line on international affairs, is experimenting with quasi-capitalist practices in its socialist economy...
...months ago, he had maintained an iron grip over the vast state bureaucracy that he commanded. World leaders had learned not to judge Kosygin by appearances. In spite of his characteristically hangdog expression, he had been capable of driving as hard a bargain as any Soviet leader since Joseph Stalin. Equally tough and tenacious in the Kremlin corridors of power, Kosygin was unsurpassed in his ability to sidestep the purges that had swept away other Soviet leaders of his generation. Justifiably, he earned a reputation as the U.S.S.R.'s great survivor...
...Petersburg (now Leningrad) in 1904, Kosygin came from modest beginnings. The son of a lathe operator, he held a series of managerial jobs in the Leningrad region, until he began a spectacular rise to power in the late 1930s. Escaping the Great Purge that dispatched millions of others to Stalin's Gulag, he became mayor of Leningrad. By 1939 he had ascended to membership in the ruling Central Committee...
...Stalin quickly recognized Kosygin's administrative skills, and promoted him into the Politburo in less than a decade. Soon after, the dictator turned on his protégé during a purge of Leningrad party officials in 1949-1950. Nikita Khrushchev recalled that Kosygin's life "was hanging by a thread. Kosygin must have drawn a lucky lottery ticket." Again, in late 1952, Kosygin's life was in jeopardy when Stalin demoted him and denounced one of his close colleagues...