Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...celebration last week of the 20th anniversary of the Soviet Secret Political Police showed further how the State ruled by Stalin has "come of age" (see col. 3). The power of the Political Police is now so ripe that their Commissar Nikolai Yezhov was able to celebrate by announcing on the dread anniversary that eight prominent Old Bolsheviks had been tried in secret, condemned to death for "treason" and secretly executed before the Soviet press was permitted to divulge even that a trial was proceeding...
Avel Yenukidze, former secretary of the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party, intimate collaborator with Nikolai Lenin, generally regarded as having been Stalin's "political mentor" after Lenin's death, long an intimate family friend not only of Stalin but of his second wife, Alliluieva, who as a child had been dandled on Yenukidze's knee...
...Leningrad, the local head of the Secret Police, Leonid Zakowsky, issued a handbill urging his election which said: "Our people are confident of their fate and their country because they now have experienced and tested their police and detective forces!" The voters also did their best, in Stalin's district they wrote slogans like HURRAH FOR COMRADE STALIN! on their ballot envelopes, and elsewhere only a few such extremists as those in Uzbekistan went so far as to murder their wives or strip them naked in order to save them from contamination in the new rite of universal suffrage...
Although Russians still have their mail tampered with, their telephones tapped, and are still likely to be waked up in the night to be carted off to jail without warrant or due process of law, it was a first step toward their education in democracy when Stalin's constitution labeled these things unconstitutional. So likewise it was education last week to 100,000,000 Russians to find that they were entitlednks, sending money abroad to Lenin & Trotsky, crisp banknotes which the go-between Litvinoff carried in his little satchel. In 1918, during the civil war with the White Russians, pugnacious...
Since the death of Lenin in 1924 and the expulsion of Trotsky, Stalin has driven and scolded 166,000,000 Russians to equip the Soviet Union with fairly adequate heavy industry, to collectivize Russian farms, to build an army, to fulfill successive Five Year Plans. The cost of these successes has been measured in the execution of thousands, and the exile to Siberia and the Polar North of hundreds of thousands who resisted his driving and scolding. To Stalin as to his people this week's election is a milestone. Last year when he gave them their Constitution, its terms...