Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...force. In the Soviet view, a concession is merely a phase in a continuing struggle." He also has doubts about the notion that as Russia evolves into a more liberal society, it will necessarily be more tractable. "In some respects," he said recently, "it was easier to deal with Stalin than with this timid, mediocre leadership that lets crises develop and has missiles...
...viet history, assassination attempts have served as a pretext for savage repression. The unsuccessful attempt on Lenin in 1918 triggered the Red Terror, in which thousands of Russians fell be fore Bolshevik firing squads; the killing of Politburo Member Sergei Kirov-carried out in 1934 on secret orders from Stalin - set off the great purges, in which millions died and millions more were sent to labor camps...
Memory Hole. Surprisingly, little has been written on the Leningrad tragedy. Many of the Russian records, according to Harrison Salisbury, an assistant managing editor of the New York Times, were destroyed or suppressed by Stalin, "as in Orwell's 'memory hole.' " Years of contacts in Russia, where he served six years as a reporter, and the information thaw that set in after Stalin's death, finally permitted Salisbury to accumulate the records, diaries and interviews from which he shaped this massive and horrifying account...
...deals with the city's illustrious history as St. Petersburg (Russia's capital until the honor was ceded to Moscow in 1918) and its cosmopolitan, cultural effervescence, which stirred not only Adolf Hitler's ire but the enduring suspicions of a xenophobic Georgian peasant, Joseph Stalin. The Paris of the Baltic, the city of Pushkin and Dostoevsky, Leningrad stood, in Salisbury's words, as "the invisible barrier between the end of Russia and the beginning of Europe." It was a prime military and propaganda target for Hitler's surging armies when, in June...
...hrer came perilously close to carrying out that objective. Beyond all reason, Stalin had rejected overwhelming evidence that the Nazis were preparing an attack; not even the movement of 4,200,000 troops to Russia's borders convinced him. As a result, Nazi infantry and panzer divisions smashed to the outskirts of Leningrad. The unprepared, disorganized Russians sustained unimaginable losses; 28 of their front-line divisions were obliterated. By the time the Germans were finally stopped, the city was surrounded. Its only open access lay to the northeast, across Lake Ladoga, toward Finland...