Word: stalinizing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Early Years. A carpenter's son, Mikoyan says that he "came from a long line of Armenian traders." According to his fiction-varnished official biography, he studied at an Armenian seminary in Tiflis (where Stalin studied for the priesthood at a Russian Orthodox seminary two decades earlier), showed daring as a youthful Red leader in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, was wounded at the barricades, narrowly escaped execution when captured by anti-Bolshevik forces. Escaping execution proved to be a special Mikoyan talent, highly useful for a man who managed to survive for a quarter-century as a high...
Official Career. Sharing the legendary Armenian gift for trading, Mikoyan became Stalin's chief trade commissar at 30, overseeing not only Soviet foreign trade but also domestic distribution of goods. After World War II, he set up the Soviet economic apparatus for milking the captive nations of Eastern Europe. During the shifting struggle for power and survival after Stalin's death. Mikoyan shrewdly sided with Nikita Khrushchev when the other schemers from the old Stalin gang joined forces against the upstart. When Khrushchev won out, the wily Armenian emerged as No. 2 man, with the title of Deputy...
...ground that bourgeois and upper-class elements have now vanished from the Soviet scene, the code drops Stalin's old category of "enemy of the people." and the clause authorizing imprisonment or transportation of the relatives of such unfortunates. But the new laws still provide for punishment of any "counterrevolutionary" act, a term broad enough to run the population of Soviet "corrective labor" camps back from their present estimated 1,000,000 to the 10 million...
...world learned when Stalin put forth his 1936 model constitution and followed it with the bloody purges of 1936-38, it is not Soviet theory but practice that counts. Stalin's successors have relaxed police surveillance, and the changes now put in black and white add up to a substantial strengthening of legal security for the individual in the Soviet Union. Yet the Communist Party remains the supreme arbiter in Soviet society...
After V-E day, George wanted to dine with Stalin in Berlin, but Montgomery put his foot down. Monty would not guarantee his safety. But there is probably no truth in the legend (which, of course, an official biographer does not mention) of George's crack about Monty. "Sir," said General Eisenhower, "I have to tell you that I hear Montgomery is after my job." "Relieved to hear it," said George VI. "I thought he wanted mine...