Word: stalinize
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...most macabre, this law-and-order sentiment has crystallized as scattered nostalgia for Stalin. Postcard-size photographs of the dictator sometimes decorate the windshields of trucks and taxis. Seeing Stalin's picture in a book, over...
Despite the fact that he was a Georgian who never learned to speak Russian without a heavy accent, Stalin succeeded in consolidating the most formidable tyranny of all time, partly because he made himself the guardian of Mother Russia in the face of real and perceived foreign enemies. Since then, the U.S.S.R. has made a fetish out of strengthening its military defenses against external challenges...
...Stalin's successors have yet to deal with a burgeoning internal threat to fortress-Moscow. This is the growth of national self-pride and self-assertion on the part of non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union. Their awakened nationalism now competes with the Russian nationalism that has underlain the country's highly defensive brand of patriotism for more than 60 years. Because of high birth rates in many of the non-Slavic regions of the U.S.S.R. and their own virtual zero population growth, Russians now constitute only 52.4% of the citizenry. By the end of the century they will...
...Central Committee chooses the General Secretary of the Communist Party, the most powerful position in the nation. The authority of the office that Brezhnev now holds is not defined by the constitution, nor is its term. Stalin, who never held the presidency, was a dictator from 1929 until he died in 1953; Khrushchev was largely able to run things his way until he made a number of blunders (harming Soviet agriculture, widening the split with China) and the Central Committee threw him out. Brezhnev has relied on a coterie of allies and exercised his power much more discreetly...
...Stalin's day, political commissars could countermand the orders of line officers. This is no longer true, but the party still dominates the military. No professional soldier serves on either the Politburo or the Central Committee's powerful Secretariat. (Defense Minister Ustinov's primary military experience was managing defense-related industries.) Not that the military is without clout. There appears to be a symbiotic relationship between the military and the party leadership that Rand Corporation Expert Benjamin Lambeth sums up as a "mutual accommodation in which the military accepts the legitimacy of the party's supremacy in return for getting...