Word: stalinizing
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...other things, an idea, often dressed up as an ism. The U.S.S.R., a hodgepodge of would-be nation states, was based on an outmoded idea, imperialism, and a modern one, totalitarianism. There was in the minds of those old men in the Kremlin the conceit, personified and perfected by Stalin, that fear makes the world go round; fear can make the worker work, the % farmer farm, the writer write and, of course, the Latvian, the Armenian, the Uzbek and the Ukrainian all take orders from Moscow...
...consequences of World War II were also ambiguous. It destroyed the Third Reich and the Empire of the Rising Sun, but it made possible Stalin's conquest of Eastern Europe and Mao's triumph in China...
...this point probably only some loose association like the proposed commonwealth, without any true central government, can bring the republics together at all. But the difficulties of making it work are immense. Of all people, Joseph Stalin gave the most eerily prophetic description. When the Soviet Union was founded on Dec. 30, 1922, he enumerated the conditions attending its birth: "devastated fields, factories at standstill, destroyed productive powers and exhausted economic resources render insufficient the separate efforts of separate republics in economic reconstruction." The union is now dying of exactly the same ills, and its heirs have yet to prove...
...character is entering a city, he must use the right bridges of the period, he must enter the proper gates. On the streets he must meet the people of the time.... Sometimes this [research] was not a problem. For example, the Inquisition, which was repressive in the manner of Stalin's police or the Gestapo, was also very methodic. In their documents they recorded everything they did. They list every name and every accusation. I made use of such documents...
Almost immediately after Operation Barbarossa was launched in June 1941, Stalin began imploring Churchill -- and, after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt -- to open a second front in Europe to draw German forces away from Russia. The pressure from Moscow was especially intense during the battle for Stalingrad. Even after the German advance was halted and reversed in 1943, Stalin continued to declare that as mighty as the revived Red Army was, it could...