Word: stalinizing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...stubby little muzhik-a peasant's son who in less than five years had emerged from relative obscurity to become the most amazing dictator the world had ever seen. This was no introverted intellectual like Lenin, no hysterical neurotic like Hitler, no brooding Byzantine murderer like Stalin. This was a cocky, ebullient farm boy-a man who could work all day, drink all night and, as he demonstrated again and again last week, jauntily settle historic issues with a quip or a proverb...
...there a rival to be disposed of? Stalin would have had his secret police torture the offender, then put a bullet in his neck. Nikita Khrushchev, up against Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the second most powerful man in the U.S.S.R., brainwashed the stubborn soldier within a week, relegated him to obscurity with airy insouciance: "I saw Zhukov today. He is in good health. We have not yet decided on a new job for him, but he will get one for which he is experienced and qualified...
...there an international crisis? Stalin was slow to commit Russia to foreign adventures, slower still to back down once he had committed Soviet prestige. Nikita Khrushchev with one brash threat against Turkey had launched a war scare that set the whole world's nerves on edge. Last week, bouncing into a reception at (of all places) the Turkish embassy, he called the crisis off between gulps of champagne: "Let him be damned who wants war. There will...
...becomes clear that T.T.'s bank, like the Musical Bank in Samuel Butler's Erewhon, deals not only in money but in moral imponderables. For the Soviet banker, unbalanced books are a small matter, but the failure to balance the books of the sacred Marx-Lenin-Stalin writings may prove fatal. The action dissolves in a mirage of Marxist motivation: whom to bribe with what is the problem. Thus, to buy silence, the television set goes to a despised subordinate, a piano to someone else, a raccoon coat to a third. Simochka is saved, at the price...
Barchester in Russia. Then comes the switch. Stalin is posthumously purged by Khrushchev & Co., and the spiral of official truth spins into reverse. Simochka, it appears, was right all along. T.T. is back in the center of his absurd universe, and the bribes fly back from the terrified recipients. Thus Novelist Grinioff extracts ribald comedy from his central theme: under tyrannous government, humanity exists in the corruption of its officials. It is human crookedness that can best the inhuman game...