Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What a change! For decades, while Soviet leaders went about the business of state, their spouses remained virtually invisible. The wives of Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Chernenko rarely appeared in public. It was not known for sure that Yuri Andropov even had a wife until she showed up to mourn him at his 1984 funeral...
...been reports that she is the niece of Gromyko (not true), that she is of Tatar descent and her actual patronymic is not Maximovna but the rather Asian-sounding Maksudovna ("I am absolutely Russian," she countered last year), that her father was a prominent official exiled to Siberia by Stalin (unlikely), that she has a brother-in-law who was a minor party official until he somehow embarrassed her husband (unconfirmed...
...swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety." Shaw's dramas brim with advocates of free thought and liberal policy, but his correspondence reveals him as a fool of the new totalitarians. Adolf Hitler is a "wonderful preacher of everything that is right and best in Toryism"; Joseph Stalin is the "greatest living statesman...
...Diplomat and Historian George Kennan, the father of the doctrine that the U.S. and its allies must "contain" Soviet expansionism around the globe, had another explanation. They believed that Leonid Brezhnev and the other Kremlin gerontocrats were seeking a buffer zone against Islamic ferment in Iran, much as Joseph Stalin had erected the Iron Curtain to protect the U.S.S.R. against its enemies in the West after World...
Whatever the motivation, Soviet expansionism was widely seen as a major threat to vital Western interests and world peace. Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union, like Stalin's, would not feel entirely secure until all other nations felt entirely insecure. Predatory or paranoid, the old men in the Kremlin seemed determined to continue playing the "Great Game" much as Rudyard Kipling had described it a hundred years before, when Czarist Russia and the British Raj maneuvered for influence among the tribes of the Hindu Kush...