Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Stalin's successors have yet to deal with a burgeoning internal threat to fortress-Moscow. This is the growth of national self-pride and self-assertion on the part of non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union. Their awakened nationalism now competes with the Russian nationalism that has underlain the country's highly defensive brand of patriotism for more than 60 years. Because of high birth rates in many of the non-Slavic regions of the U.S.S.R. and their own virtual zero population growth, Russians now constitute only 52.4% of the citizenry. By the end of the century they will...
...Central Committee chooses the General Secretary of the Communist Party, the most powerful position in the nation. The authority of the office that Brezhnev now holds is not defined by the constitution, nor is its term. Stalin, who never held the presidency, was a dictator from 1929 until he died in 1953; Khrushchev was largely able to run things his way until he made a number of blunders (harming Soviet agriculture, widening the split with China) and the Central Committee threw him out. Brezhnev has relied on a coterie of allies and exercised his power much more discreetly...
...Stalin's day, political commissars could countermand the orders of line officers. This is no longer true, but the party still dominates the military. No professional soldier serves on either the Politburo or the Central Committee's powerful Secretariat. (Defense Minister Ustinov's primary military experience was managing defense-related industries.) Not that the military is without clout. There appears to be a symbiotic relationship between the military and the party leadership that Rand Corporation Expert Benjamin Lambeth sums up as a "mutual accommodation in which the military accepts the legitimacy of the party's supremacy in return for getting...
...developed a tradition or institution to assure a smooth transfer of authority. The U.S.S.R. is a nation where supreme power changes hands only through death or coup. Vladimir Lenin's demise was hastened by an assassin's bullet. There is a lingering, but unproven, suspicion that Joseph Stalin was murdered. Georgi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev were ignominiously ousted from office. What fate is in store for the collective leadership now ruling the U.S.S.R.? Sovietologists agree that the oldsters clustered around President Leonid Brezhnev in the Kremlin will merely succumb to the inexorable logic of the actuarial tables...
...show that the new leaders will be better schooled than the old rulers, some of whom, like Kirilenko, had no real college education. Others, like Brezhnev, attended the vocational colleges that were characteristic of the 1920s and 1930s. Since the younger men began their careers around the time of Stalin's death in 1953, they are likely to be less fearful and more self-assertive than their predecessors, whose lives were under constant threat from the paranoid dictator. Nearly all the newcomers will have had more exposure to the West...