Word: stalinizing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Stalin's autocracy was incapable of dealing with the vastly enlarged empire gained in World War II. The aging dictator ruthlessly suppressed nationalist tendencies in Poland, launched a bitter hate campaign against the recalcitrant Tito, and in the Soviet Union refused his war weary people any of the easing of their misery that they had hoped peace would bring. Toward the end of his days, Stalin may have begun to see the essential weakness of his personal autocracy; in 1952 he called, for the first time since 1939, a congress of the party, reconvened the Central Committee...
...Timashuk Woman. Counting against all the old Politburocrats and Kremlin toadies was the party's and people's hatred of Stalin. All were guilty by association, and by the innumerable crimes they had committed at the dictator's direction, but Malenkov was closer to Stalin than any of the others. As Stalin lay ill, a letter reached him from a woman doctor called Timashuk, warning him of improper treatments being used by his doctors. The "sickly suspicious" Stalin ordered the top specialists of the Kremlin dispensary arrested, called in Security Boss Semyon D. Ignatiev* and told...
...Malenkov? The question hung in the air above the Congress meeting. In the same speech, Khrushchev revealed that one of Stalin's last acts was an effort to liquidate almost the whole Presidium. The inference Khrushchev may have wanted drawn from these facts is that "someone" was exploiting the dying Stalin's well-known psychosis to get all his rivals for leadership liquidated...
...adroit politician. Georgy Malenkov was probably too ruthless an intriguer for the big institutions (NKVD, the army, etc.) to entrust their future to. Though he lasted 23 months as Premier of the Soviet Union. Malenkov lasted only 16 days as First Secretary of the party, the crucial job Stalin willed him. Next in line after Malenkov in the hierarchy was Beria (who was quickly liquidated, a sop to popular anti-Stalin feeling, as much as for the crimes he had committed). Then came Molotov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan...
...line, for he had ascended to the Politburo at the top of the hierarchy a dozen years after the oldest hands, was Nikita Khrushchev. It is unlikely that Khrushchev had a personal apparatus powerful enough to catapult him into the general secretaryship of the party a fortnight after Stalin's death. The great institutions behind the struggle obviously settled for the ebullient little man from the village of Kalinovka in the region of Kursk because, at that step of the leadership crisis, Khrushchev had the advantage of a fairly new face, and being a man without ideological subtlety...