Word: stalinizing
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Many East European emigre groups in the U.S. are aghast at any reliance on the U.S.S.R. With unfaded memories of the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states in 1940 and Stalin's man-made famine that some say killed 6 million in the Ukraine in the 1930s, they argue that at the close of the war the Red Army seized unused German stationery, blank military forms, typewriters, inks and stamps, all useful for producing forged documents. They charge that the Soviet Union has fabricated evidence as a way to intimidate fervently anti-Communist East Europeans settled...
Magadan. It is a name that turns Soviet hearts to ice and evokes memories of the long ago midnight knock on the door. The port of entry to the most deadly archipelago of the Gulag system, it became a synonym for the terror Joseph Stalin visited upon the land. At least 2 million prisoners were worked to death in its gold mines and timber forests and on its road projects. Since then, with few exceptions, the city of Magadan and the vast region around it have been closed to foreigners. When the Soviets permitted a small group to visit Magadan...
...camps are gone, swallowed up by time, destalinization and the cultural amnesia of a history still unwritten. There are no longer any huts, gates, guard towers, or shuffling columns of prisoners on their way to another day of killing slave labor. There are no memorials, no cemeteries dedicated to Stalin's victims. Some of the camp names that dot the pages of prisoner memoirs are ordinary towns now: Shturmovoy, Elgen, Yagodnoye, Mylga, Magadan itself. "When you go to Magadan and stand upon the Kolyma highway," a Muscovite advised, "you must look down at the earth beneath your feet and think...
Today it is difficult to imagine the bones, the icy graves, the miseries and horrors that took place in Stalin's Magadan. Whatever it was in 1937, Magadan in 1987 is a very different place. The region's 552,000 residents are better housed, better fed, better clothed and better paid than most other Soviet citizens. The majority of them came as young volunteers in search of adventure. Many stayed for the challenge and high pay of the Arctic frontier: salaries run around 500 rubles ($750) a month, nearly triple the national average. "Like many of my friends, I came...
...Moscow Trials of 1936 were, he recalls, "a decisive turning point in my own intellectual and political development . . . I never suspected that ((Stalin)) and the Soviet regime were prepared to violate every fundamental norm of human decency that had been woven into the texture of civilized life." Some friends and colleagues remained lockstep Stalinists, and Hook brings them onstage as object lessons. Lincoln Steffens had famously seen the future in the U.S.S.R. and proclaimed that it worked. It was less well known, notes the author, that Steffens "had previously seen it in Italy . . . where he thought it had also worked...