Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Just four months before an agent of Joseph Stalin's secret police shattered his skull with an alpine axe in 1940, Bolshevik Revolutionary Leader Leon Trotsky sold his confidential correspondence to Harvard for $10,000. Last week the university's Houghton Library unveiled it. Included were Trotsky's own copies of 17,500 letters written by him and to him from 1927 to 1940, and kept under wraps ever since at Trotsky's own insistence, in order to protect his correspondents from Stalin's possible retribution...
Trotsky's letters disclose a new and fascinating personal dimension of the revolutionary genius who, as Lenin's right-hand man, led the Bolshevik armed forces in the October 1917 revolution. After Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky lost a struggle for power to Stalin; this ended in Trotsky's banishment and Stalin's Great Purge of supposed "Trotskyites" in the late 1930s. The consequences of that savage quarrel run like a sanguinary thread throughout the Trotsky correspondence...
...letters show, the exiled Trotsky was as indefatigable in his attempts to overthrow Stalin as Stalin was tireless in his efforts to kill Trotsky, his family and his followers. A large number of Trotsky's letters are devoted to the organizing of his own revolutionary groups outside the U.S.S.R.-even as Stalin was organizing a special unit of his far-reaching secret police, the GPU, to hunt down Trotsky's supporters, family and Trotsky himself. By 1938 his first wife and two sons had already been exterminated...
...same planet with this major nuclear power as they must live with us. Hence, I have opposed the human rights doctrine of President Jimmy Carter form the very outset despite my full recognition of the terrible conditions of life in the Soviet Union, though far less terrible than in Stalin's era so that we know more about them and have more contact. Dissidents are allowed to leave, rather than being executed. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union faces a restless internal population, even less productive than we Americans, notably in agriculture; it faces possible dissension of its Moslem and other minorities...
...remained the same: the distinction goes to the person or group who, as it was stated on this page in 1943, "has done the most to change the news, for better or for worse." There have been designees very plainly in the latter category-Adolf Hitler (1938), Joseph Stalin (1939)-but selection has never necessarily connoted either the magazine's, or the world's, approval of the subject. Thus the editors had little difficulty naming Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, intransigent leader of the Iranian revolution, as TIME'S Man of the Year...