Word: stalinized
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Contrasted with the other Allies. Stalin played a shrewd and knowledgeable game. Ulam is at his best when he speculates about the Soviet leader's motives and plans. Only Stalin knew the extent of Russia's weakness. And by exploiting his opponents' fear and guilt, he was able to win his objectives, and more. Throughout his East European campaign, and particularly in Poland, Stalin mixed cunning, ruthlessness and masterful diplomacy to win the reins of power for pro-Russian communists...
English Kremlinologist Robert Conquest, author of The Great Terror, an exhaustive study of Stalin's purges of the '30s, says of the Medvedev history: "It is the first full attempt by a Russian to deal with the Stalin period, and gives by far the most detailed account yet of the errors and horrors of Stalinism...
Medvedev offers some new and intriguing evidence about Stalin's career, citing unpublished and previously unknown memoirs and monographs written by victims of the purges. Performing a delicate balancing act, he manages to deliver a scathing indictment of the Soviet regime during the quarter of a century that Stalin ruled, while at the same time endorsing the goals of the Bolshevik revolution and acquitting Lenin of responsibility for the crimes committed by his successor. In answer to the question of why Lenin permitted Stalin to contend for power in the early '20s, Medvedev writes: "Lenin's natural...
Aberration. If he has an occasional bone to pick with Lenin, however, Medvedev has nothing but condemnation for Stalin. He sees Stalin as typical of the "unstable and dishonorable people who join a revolutionary movement and later degenerate into tyrants." Medvedev writes: "His political views were formed under the influence of Marx and Lenin, but they did not grow into convictions, into a system of Communist moral principles . . . He was only a fellow traveler of revolution." Medvedev's thesis is that Stalinism was an aberration of Communism and that the Marxist-Leninist system is still the best hope...
...writing the book in 1962 and reportedly submitted it for publication to the Party Central Committee's Academy of Social Sciences in 1965. The book was rejected. He then revised and greatly expanded it, completing the work in 1968. Forty folders full of research material on the Stalin period were among the papers taken from his apartment...