Word: stalinize
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...most virulent form by the neofascist Pamyat movement, which wants to absolve Russians of responsibility for the horrors of the communist era. Pamyat contends that the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution was actually conceived and carried out by Freemasons and Jews. The search for scapegoats was a national passion long before Stalin filled the docks at show trials, and the fall of the Soviet Union has sparked another round of finger pointing. This time, democrats and conservatives have reached rare unanimity about whom to blame: Mikhail Gorbachev...
When it came to forging Soviet power, Joseph Stalin and his successors more than fulfilled their plan. Now Boris Yeltsin and, presumably, his successors have to undo it. The country simply cannot afford such oversize armed forces, and the civilian economy desperately needs the money, talent and productive power locked inside the military-industrial complex. But demobilizing on such a scale poses an especially Herculean challenge to a country that barely has a functioning economy and has no national consensus on how cutting down the troops, the arsenal and the production lines ought to occur...
ROBERT DUVALL, BULKED UP INSIDE HIS military overcoat and nearly expressionless beneath a bushy mustache, looks as much like Frankenstein's monster as Joseph Stalin in HBO's new film about the Soviet dictator. Certainly his deeds are just as monstrous, and even more unfathomable. Directed by Ivan Passer, STALIN vividly chronicles the revolutionary footsoldier's rise to power and his ruthless, increasingly paranoid reign of terror. The scenes of Stalin's 1930s' purges are especially chilling, and the film gratifyingly avoids hokey re-creations of "big" historical events like the Yalta Conference. Still, despite Duvall's intense performance...
Moreover, the artists' story is largely tragic. The revolution devoured its children. In the 1930s, after Stalin's seizure of power, the work of these artists was ruthlessly suppressed as "bourgeois formalism." It lacked the three nosts of Socialist Realism: ideinost, or belief in the class basis of truth; narodnost, or accessibility to the people; and partinost, or Party spirit. The artists now appear in the treble guise of visionaries, heroes and victims. Most art lovers probably believe, on this point, that Stalin betrayed the revolution and are unwilling to think of Lenin as the savage autocrat he was; they...
...less incriminating to the Soviet Union's communist rulers were minutes of a March 5, 1940, Politburo meeting making plain that it was Joseph Stalin who ordered the massacre of Polish officers whose bodies were later found in the Katyn Forest. Almost simultaneously with the release of the KAL transcripts, Moscow released documents showing that Stalin signed the minutes, which contained an order for "execution by a firing squad" -- without trial or indictment -- of 25,700 Polish officers and other notables...