Word: stalinized
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...quite 20 years after Stalin's death, a Soviet scholar has produced the most comprehensive and revealing investigation of Stalinism ever to appear anywhere. Roy Medvedev, 46, is a schoolteacher turned historian. Like his twin brother, the prominent geneticist Zhores, he is a dedicated Communist and patriot, who believes in Marxism-Leninism and its vision of the future.* When he set about writing Let History Judge, Medvedev was motivated neither by disillusionment with the Bolshevik experiment nor by a desire to discredit the present regime. What he wanted, instead, was to enlighten fellow Soviet Communists about 50 years...
Besides being the first sustained attempt by a Soviet scholar to deal more or less evenhandedly with the whole Stalin period, Let History Judge surpasses existing literature. Soviet and Western alike, in its panoramic treatment of Stalinism's impact upon individual lives. It singles out the fate of some 600 functionaries and victims of the purges, using intimate details from unpublished memoirs and monographs, deathbed testimonies and confessions, official reports unavailable in the West, and private correspondence, including previously unpublished letters from Lenin and Stalin...
Medvedev quotes from a private family archive an eyewitness account of how Stalin personally led the interrogation and humiliation of his purged Ukrainian party chief, Stanislav Kosior. There is also an authoritative description of the death of Stalin's prewar Aviation Minister, Mikhail Kaganovich, a Jew whom Stalin accused of collaborating with the Nazis. The man was summoned to the office of Anastas Mikoyan, one of Stalin's most durable aides and later Foreign Minister and President of the U.S.S.R., now retired and writing his memoirs. When Kaganovich was confronted with the false evidence against him, he asked...
...gave Russian workers the speedup back in 1935 has resurfaced. Alexei Stakhanov became Stalin's original "shock worker" by producing 102 tons of coal in a six-hour shift-eleven times the norm. Soviet officials then used the high output of dedicated "Stakhanovites" as a pretext to raise production quotas for everyone. Now 66, Stakhanov told Pravda that there was too much emphasis on production statistics, "machines, automation, percentages and tons." When it came time to praise the workers, he said, he had seen party officials giving out awards while sneaking glances at their wristwatches. "Praise should...
...resolutely dull that one hungers for the vigorous vulgarity of, say, Doctor Zhivago. The film makers occasionally comply, albeit inadvertently, as when Schaffner stages the obligatory scene of Mad Monk Rasputin wenching it up in a haystack, or when Goldman has Nikolai Vladimir Ilich Lenin grouse, "Well, Stalin has been exiled to Siberia again." There is even an occasional feint at topical significance. Count Witte (Laurence Olivier), trying to persuade Nicholas (Michael Jayston) to halt the Russo-Japanese War, says, "I'm advising you to stop a hopeless war." Replies the Czar: "The Russia my father gave me never...