Word: stalinize
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...developed a tradition or institution to assure a smooth transfer of authority. The U.S.S.R. is a nation where supreme power changes hands only through death or coup. Vladimir Lenin's demise was hastened by an assassin's bullet. There is a lingering, but unproven, suspicion that Joseph Stalin was murdered. Georgi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev were ignominiously ousted from office. What fate is in store for the collective leadership now ruling the U.S.S.R.? Sovietologists agree that the oldsters clustered around President Leonid Brezhnev in the Kremlin will merely succumb to the inexorable logic of the actuarial tables...
...show that the new leaders will be better schooled than the old rulers, some of whom, like Kirilenko, had no real college education. Others, like Brezhnev, attended the vocational colleges that were characteristic of the 1920s and 1930s. Since the younger men began their careers around the time of Stalin's death in 1953, they are likely to be less fearful and more self-assertive than their predecessors, whose lives were under constant threat from the paranoid dictator. Nearly all the newcomers will have had more exposure to the West...
Most Soviet citizens do not share Andropov's high regard for the KGB. They view it with deep distaste and fear, in part because memories are still vivid of the murderous role played by the secret police in Stalin's dreadful purges. Although his successors halted mass terror and greatly reduced the KGB's autonomy, the agency continues to keep stern watch over every aspect of Soviet citizens' lives...
...Dzerzhinsky Square; in tsarist times it housed the All-Russian Insurance Co. Behind the headquarters is the most celebrated KGB structure, Lubyanka Prison, through which tens of thousands of Soviet citizens have passed on their way to concentration camps or execution. These probably included three of Stalin's own secret police chiefs-Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrenti Beria-who were shot following their fall from power. The KGB has administrative offices in every major center, and KGB officers occupy key posts in the Soviet armed forces and the regular police, as well as in factories, government offices, universities...
...professional. His most notable previous post: Soviet Ambassador in Budapest, where he helped put down the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Among Andropov's most important functions is to keep the KGB under firm party control so that the secret police can never again wield the power it possessed under Stalin, when it arrested, tortured and killed thousands of loyal party officials...