Word: stalinizing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Thus Nikita Khrushchev fired his secret police chief, one of the last and most bloodstained survivors of the Stalin tyranny-a shadowy, trim little man and a gumshoe general who won his highest promotions and decorations in the "Great Patriotic War" leading grisly campaigns not against the Germans but against his own Soviet people...
Bloody Past. Trained at Moscow's Frunze Military Academy to be a professional soldier, Serov was assigned on graduation to the NKVD. He first caught the Kremlin's approving eye in the '30s as chief Chekist in the Ukraine (where Nikita Khrushchev also served as Stalin's troubleshooter). shooting and deporting to certain death in Siberian slave camps hundreds of thousands of peasants who resisted collectivization. When World War II began, Serov, an equal in bloodstained iniquity to Nazi Germany's Himmler, specialized in genocide and in exterminating "anti-Soviet elements" in the new Soviet...
...estimated 1,420,000), was signed by him. He shot or shipped away whole Soviet nationalities-the Crimean Tartars (200,000), the Volga Germans (500,000), the Chechen-Ingush (410,000) of the Caucasus. When the Red army rolled back the Germans, Serov crushed resisters behind the lines. Appointed Stalin's top cop in Berlin, he kidnaped German rocket scientists, dragooned slave labor for the East German uranium mines. It was at about that time that he bragged of knowing how to break every bone in a man's body without killing...
Such internal pressures are bound to alter the character of the Communist regimes, particularly if these regimes are denied the glamor and prestige of great external successes. You may recall that when Khrushchev, in 1956, attacked the abuses of Stalin, he explained that they could not have been corrected earlier because "many victories were gained during his lifetime...
...Bahrein Island. The Soviet Union sent its dancers and acrobats, sponsored joint Russian-Iranian projects such as locust control on the border, even promised junketing President Kliment Voroshilov would come to Teheran next month in repayment for the Shah's 1956 visit to Moscow. But all Iranians remember Stalin's attempt to grab Azerbaijan in the north after World...