Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Recalling that Dictator Stalin officially "claimed a quantitative fulfillment of 93.7%" for the First Five-Year Plan, Mr. Lyons analyzes in a chapter the figures on which this is based, discusses many a "cute piece of arithmetical legerdemain" used by Kremlin economists. "That the Plan has been accepted even by hostile capitalist economists as on the whole 'successful' shows the gullibility and naivete of those who deal in cold figures instead of living realities...
...Stalin launched the Second Five-Year Plan which is now under way, says Mr. Lyons, by having the Soviet parliament adopt measures which "redefined Socialism to mean merely state monopoly of all branches of economy-a feudalistic serf 'socialism' undreamed of by socialist theorists and philosophers and agitators before the Soviet...
Censorship De Luxe, While Stalin was still seeking recognition of his regime by President Roosevelt, correspondents in Moscow could be of immense service by tinting their dispatches favorably to influence U. S. opinion, but Mr. Lyons thinks that once recognition was achieved the State has found it convenient to jockey out of Russia nearly all the more experienced U. S. correspondents who know too much about the last 20 years. Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinoff, charges Mr. Lyons, secured his own dismissal in 1934, and he thinks that today the Kremlin prefers to have in Moscow diplomatic and other representatives...
Afterward, with the United Press jubilating throughout the world at Lyons' scoop and booking him for radio speeches and lecture tours, his own reaction was: "I was overwhelmed with a conviction of failure. I had failed to confront Stalin with the problems which were by this time weighing on my own conscience-the use of terror as a technique of government, the suppression and punishment of heretical opinion within the ranks of devoted communists, the persecution of scientists and scholars, the distortion of history to fit new policies, systematic forced labor, the virtual enslavement of workers and peasants...
Similarly Walter Duranty, to whom Stalin granted an interview suddenly a few days later, has repeatedly told friends he curses his own failure to query J. Stalin on fundamentals...