Word: stalinized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...internment in a Moscow psychiatric hospital. More recently, Geneticist Zhores Medvedev and his twin brother. Historian Roy Medvedev, published A Question of Madness (TIME, Sept. 27), which tells of their struggle to win Zhores' release from a mental hospital after he published an attack on the theories of Stalin's favorite scientist, Geneticist T.D. Lysenko...
...Khrushchev's 1956 secret speech to the 20th Soviet Party Congress opened a debate among Marxists over how faithful Communists were to live with the truth that an estimated 20 million murders had been committed in their name by the Stalinist bureaucracy between 1934 and 1953. Khrushchev denounced Stalin as an evil genius who was able to seize control of the party by some terrible historical accident. Medvedev's view is less simplistic. He argues that in every social upheaval there is a fanatical fringe whose idealistic elements can easily be infiltrated by opportunists and criminals. Stalin, according...
Khrushchev took the line that Stalin's perversion of the Soviet system started with the purges of the '30s. Medvedev is probably the first and certainly the most distinguished Soviet historian to agree with Western critics that Stalin had already begun to corrupt the party during Lenin's lifetime. In one of his few but significant criticisms of the U.S.S.R.'s founding father, Medvedev suggests that Lenin's "natural enthusiasm for people" kept him from recognizing Stalin's villainous character until it was too late...
...however, is remarkably free from both the hostility that often mars Western studies of Russian politics and the dogmatism that distorts Soviet scholarship. For example. Medvedev proves a hard-digging detective, while at the same time a fair judge of evidence, in his handling of the persistent story that Stalin worked as a double agent for the Czarist secret police before the revolution. Much as Medvedev detests the dictator and therefore may have wanted to believe this rumor himself, he reviews the case in nine tightly argued pages, finds it inconclusive and acquits Stalin of the charge...
...History Judge represents a subtle and sophisticated endeavor by a man of exceptional intellect and high principles to tell the whole truth about a Communist disaster without throwing into doubt the Communist program and philosophy. He fails on the second count. Those chapters that reconstruct what happened under Stalin seem measured and secure as a historical record. But in the more theoretical sections, where he attempts to explain how a Communist revolution could give way to wholesale slaughter of a citizenry by its government, Medvedev is in difficulty. While asserting that Stalin's rise to power was not inevitable...