Word: stalinizing
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...podium of the Kremlin's Palace of Congresses, - opened a thick folder and began his 2-hr. 41-min. speech. Between Lenin and Gorbachev lay seven decades of Soviet history, much of it officially ignored or obfuscated -- and nearly all of it haunted by the ghost of Joseph Stalin. But Gorbachev had insisted there should be no "blank pages" in his country's past. Now, in an address marking the 70th anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, he had an ideal occasion to demonstrate the glasnost (openness) that has become a watchword of his 31 months in power. What...
Gorbachev did, however, fill in a few of Soviet history's most troubling blanks. Not since Nikita Khrushchev's now famous secret speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956 had a Soviet leader so emphatically denounced the atrocities of the Stalin era -- particularly the terror-filled 1930s, when millions of citizens were arrested or summarily executed, or starved to death as a result of forced collectivization. Declared Gorbachev: "The guilt of Stalin and his immediate entourage before the party and the people for the wholesale repressive measures and acts of lawlessness is enormous and unforgivable. This is a lesson...
...Gorbachev cracked open new windows in the previously impenetrable wall of Soviet history. He partly restored the reputation of Khrushchev, who died in disgrace 16 years ago, following his ouster in 1964. "It required no small courage of the party and its leadership, headed by Nikita Khrushchev, to criticize ((Stalin's)) personality cult and its consequences and to re-establish socialist legality," Gorbachev told the 5,000 Soviet officials and foreign dignitaries assembled before him in the cavernous modern hall. Khrushchev, who tried to launch decentralizing reforms similar to Gorbachev's, had not been publicly named by a Soviet leader...
Gorbachev cited other historical "nonpersons." Leon Trotsky, an ally of Lenin's who was exiled by Stalin and assassinated by a Soviet agent in 1940, received a brief mention -- but only as a power-hungry schemer "who always vacillated and cheated." More fortunate was Nikolai Bukharin, another close Lenin aide who ran afoul of Stalin and was executed as a spy in 1938. Gorbachev credited Bukharin, who supported Lenin's free market-oriented New Economic Policy and opposed forced collectivization, with helping to frustrate Trotsky's ambitions. Yet Gorbachev felt compelled to cite Lenin's reservations about Bukharin's ideological...
...thorough, hard-hitting appraisal of the party's past mistakes. "I was very disappointed," said Mathematician Naum Meiman, 76, one of the country's most prominent dissidents. "The speech was the result of a compromise between Gorbachev and others in the leadership who are against a true evaluation of Stalin's role." Fellow Dissident Physicist Andrei Sakharov told callers after the address that "not everything satisfied me," adding, "I would have expected, and I hoped for, more." There were indications, in fact, that more would be forthcoming. Gorbachev announced that two special commissions would be set up, one to examine...