Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...power. The prodigious achievements of the U.S.S.R. in mining, agriculture and energy production still conjure up images of the infamous Siberian mines, collective farms and hydroelectric projects of the 1930s, where armies of political prisoners, conscript peasants and idealistic volunteers "built Communism" under the cruel supervision of Joseph Stalin's armed guards and commissars. Today's reality is less harsh, but the profile of the country still bulges with muscle; the recitation of its endowments and achievements is still redolent of brute force, monumentality and projects that dwarf and sometimes devour...
...since the revolution," says British Historian Leonard Schapiro. Nikita Khrushchev, while a much more sympathetic figure in many ways, ordered reforms one day, crackdowns the next, and engaged, as his comrades-turned-usurpers charged, in "harebrained schemes." His was a manic-depressive leadership. Before him were 25 years of Stalin's government by massacre. The toll: at least 20 million dead in camps, prisons and famines. Before that, the civil war, the revolution, and centuries of upheaval under the Tsars...
...grocery stores or underwear in the department stores. Nor have they loosened the reins of repression during the past 16 years. At the same time, however, material conditions are easier, and life has settled into a consistent, predictable norm that avoids the extremes of Khrushchev's erratic liberalization and Stalin's relentless terror. For many Soviets, that is reassuring, especially against the backdrop of their country's new prestige and power abroad...
...most macabre, this law-and-order sentiment has crystallized as scattered nostalgia for Stalin. Postcard-size photographs of the dictator sometimes decorate the windshields of trucks and taxis. Seeing Stalin's picture in a book, over...
Despite the fact that he was a Georgian who never learned to speak Russian without a heavy accent, Stalin succeeded in consolidating the most formidable tyranny of all time, partly because he made himself the guardian of Mother Russia in the face of real and perceived foreign enemies. Since then, the U.S.S.R. has made a fetish out of strengthening its military defenses against external challenges...