Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...trip wires, the prisoner reached the camp fence, then turned around and defiantly called to a nearby SS guard: "Don't be a coward. Shoot, shoot." When the prisoner made a grab for the fence, the guard fired one bullet. It instantly killed the elder son of Joseph Stalin...
...U.S.S.R. had some 25 subs, but Lenin's successor, Stalin, was dissatisfied with such an invisible fleet. In the mid-1930s, he reinstated the navy as an independent service and started building a huge surface fleet. The Germans captured the partly finished hulks when they swept into Russia in 1941. Thus the mission of defending the Red Army's coastal flanks fell to the Soviet navy's ragtag fleet. Most seagoing men would have chafed at such a coastline assignment, but a young captain named Sergei Gorshkov welcomed it as an opportunity...
Sitting Ducks. After the war, Stalin started building big warships again, but only 15 cruisers had been completed by the time he died in 1953. The new chief in the Kremlin had no sympathy for Stalin's plans. Nikita Khrushchev fired Stalin's navy chief, Admiral Kuznetsov, and brought in Gorshkov, who by then was naval chief of staff...
...story of his ugly ordeal behind Soviet bars for 18 months is as harrowing as anything in Koestler's Darkness at Noon, despite the fact that it was not Stalin's grim regime but Khrushchev's that punished Wynne. Though he was sometimes beaten, the primary torture was calculated degradation aimed at reducing Wynne to a broken, pliable animal. He never had adequate clothes or blankets for the harsh Rus sian winters. He was forced to live amid the stench of his own excrement...
...basket and the Black Sea oil wells. After the battle, the Soviet armies paused only a few times before they had driven the Germans back to Germany. The victory also restored much respectability to a Communist movement tarnished in the 1930s by the Stalinist purges and the cynical Hitler-Stalin pact; the party signed up many new believers who mistakenly credited Communism-and not simply patriotism-for inspiring the Russian victory at Stalingrad...