Word: stalinizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ghost of Joseph Stalin rose out of his granite tomb in Red Square last week and stalked the crenelated walls of the Kremlin with an awesome message for Communists everywhere. Like Hamlet's father, the old dictator gave notice that he was doomed to walk the night and "to fast in fires till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away." The man who raised the ghost was Nikita Khrushchev, no Prince Hamlet, but now Stalin's clearest heir...
Tale with Tears. Mounting the podium with extreme solemnity, Khrushchev spoke for three hours with great care and feeling-and sometimes in tears. His first words were to praise Stalin: in the early days, said Khrushchev, Stalin was a devoted and truly great servant of the party, and in the decade after Lenin's death (1924) his leadership was indispensable. But in the last 19 years of his life Stalin had done enormous harm to the party, the Soviet Union and the Soviet people...
Khrushchev said. The crucial event had been the murder (1934) of Leningrad Party Boss Sergei Kirov. A drastic change had then come over Stalin-a "phobia" about treachery-and he had never been the same afterward. Khrushchev went on to deliver a devastating indictment of what the congress in open session had heard described as Stalin's "20 years of dictatorship and lies." At the 18th Congress, Khrushchev had shouted, "Long live the towering genius of all humanity . . . our beloved Comrade Stalin!" But now he charged...
...Stalin had contrived and falsified evidence, against party members
whom he (in most cases wrongly) conceived to be his enemies. He
"murdered" (Khrushchev's word) hundreds of old Bolsheviks, including 70
out of 133 members of the Central Committee in 1937. He had tortured
people in order to wring confessions out of them. Even little children
had been tortured, said Khrushchev, as tears streamed down his face. To
get confessions, Stalin had promised some victims a dacha (country
cottage), but "the only dacha they saw was underground."
...Stalin had placed complete faith in his pact with Hitler in 1939 and scorned warnings from Soviet diplomats in Berlin, from Britain's Churchill and Sir Stafford