Word: stalinizing
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...second important consequence was convincing Stalin that the Western powers would never resist Hitler's increasingly aggressive expansion eastward. Stalin had several times proposed a treaty with the Western powers to check Hitler's ambitions, but he had been ignored. With the treachery characteristic of him -- he had purged dozens of his top army officers on false charges of conspiring with the Germans to overthrow him -- he began exploring the possibility of signing an alliance with those same Germans. To Hitler, who had been ranting about "the struggle against Bolshevism" for nearly 20 years, it seemed like an offer...
...aimed at and prepared . . . any time from Sept. 1, 1939, onward." If anything more was needed, it was the neutralization of Poland's other big neighbor, Soviet Russia, and Hitler had achieved that just the previous week by suddenly concluding a treaty of cooperation with his supposed archenemy Joseph Stalin. And so, at the appointed hour of 4:45 a.m. (Poland time), Hitler struck all along the 1,750-mile Polish frontier. The catastrophic war of revenge that he alone wanted was now his to command...
...disaster: the Soviet army invaded eastern Poland and proceeded to grab whatever had not yet been grabbed by the Germans. Actually, this had all been preordained in several secret protocols of the previous month's Nazi-Soviet treaty. Only the date of the Soviet invasion had been left uncertain. Stalin had a little difficulty in thinking up an excuse to attack, but he finally declared that he was acting "to restore peace and order in Poland, which has been destroyed by the disintegration of the Polish State...
Back in 1947, as it became clear that Poland's Peasant Party would beat the Communists, Stalin's army cut off its phones and eventually sent the party's chieftain, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, fleeing to the West. In Hungary that year, after the anti-Communist Smallholders Party won power, the Soviet army arrested its leader and forced a confession of subversion...
...challenges that will arise from the fracturing of the Soviet bloc will help the U.S. avoid the unseemly tendency to gloat. But it should not obscure the epochal nature of the change occurring. Poland and Hungary are abandoning the basic tenets that Lenin distorted after Marx and that Stalin distorted after Lenin: a rigidly centralized economy, a one-party political system and a suppression of personal freedoms. People are electing their representatives for the first time. They are reading independent newspapers and starting their own businesses. They are even tearing down the fences that have kept the world...