Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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After John Paul's trip, French Religion Analyst Henri Fesquet sneered: "The Pope is nothing by himself. He has empty hands." Perhaps so, but that smacks of the hoary remark once made by Stalin about divisions. The view may be too harsh, too gloomy. The new Tory majority leader of Britain's House
...almost pathetic spectacle of an infirm Soviet leader clinging to power rather than wielding it. In Vladimir Lenin's last years a series of strokes partially paralyzed both his body and his ability to act decisively. Lenin's incapacity contributed to the rise of his successor Joseph Stalin. At the end of his life Lenin, who had been so ruthlessly effective in his prime, was reduced to whining about Stalin's "rudeness" and "suggesting" that his comrades on the Politburo remove Stalin from the post of Party General Secretary...
...Stalin's own dotage and death in 1953 were marked by a macabre irony. His last purge was to have been a mammoth pogrom. The pretext was the spurious charge that the Kremlin doctors, most of them Jews, were poisoning political luminaries in their care. In his terminal paranoia, Stalin came to believe in the plot and suspected that his personal physician was a British agent. As blood vessels began to burst inside his own brain, plunging him into a prolonged agony, the dictator would not let any doctor near him on his deathbed...
...large extent, politically disabled. For the rest of his presidency-and indeed his life-Wilson's wife literally guided his hand as he signed documents. Franklin Roosevelt, who had been in poor health for years, took a turn for the worse during his wartime meeting at Yalta with Stalin and Winston Churchill in February 1945. After a particularly contentious session on the future of Poland, F.D.R. developed gray splotches on his skin, a paroxysmal cough and irregular blood pressure. Two months later he was dead of a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs...
...eventually retired to their plantations or farms, their golf and their memoirs, their home towns in the heartland, there to play the comfortable roles of folk heroes and elder statesmen. The Soviet Union has no such tradition. The top leaders there either die on the job like Lenin and Stalin, or are ousted and relegated, like Georgi Malenkov, to diplomatic exile, or, like Nikita Khrushchev, to virtual house arrest and the ignominy of being an unperson. Since Khrushchev's overthrow in 1964, only two higher-echelon Soviet leaders have retired because of age: Anastas Mikoyan and Nikolai Shvernik. Numerous...