Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...daily, has been providing much livelier reading lately, as policies are debated in prominently displayed letters to the editor. In the latest round, the newspaper last week gave front-page play to a letter that included a sweeping condemnation of the party's record of dictatorship and repression under Stalin. The missive cited a failure to restrain "princelings who exceeded their authority...
...functioned as personal censor for Pushkin and banished Dostoyevsky to Siberia. Revolution only encouraged the Russian candle-snuffers. Lenin said, "Ideas are much more fatal things than guns," a founder's nihil obstat that culminated in the years of poet destruction (Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva) and book murder under Stalin...
...figure came at a heated session of the Politburo last week to calm the increasingly public dispute over the limits of reform. Ligachev embodied the critical backlash against the new openness, which has brought freer discussion of abuses in Soviet society today and the brutal repression of the Stalin era. As the party's ideological watchdog, Ligachev strongly believed that this relaxation was becoming a dangerous weapon in the hands of anti-Soviet forces, as well as a destabilizing force within the country...
What apparently spurred Ligachev into open criticism was the unprecedented accounts in the Soviet press of the excesses of the Stalin era, which had been largely hidden from the public for decades. Although Gorbachev encouraged this examination of the past, Ligachev chastised editors for going too far with Stalin exposes, accusing them of a "disrespectful attitude toward those generations that built socialism." In a February speech to party leaders, he again complained of people who "try to present our history as a chain of mistakes and crimes and to gloss over great achievements of the past and present." Added Ligachev...
When the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya published a letter six weeks ago defending Stalin's rule and suggesting that glasnost was leading to "ideological mishmash," suspicion immediately fell on Ligachev as the instigator, if not the author. (The letter was ostensibly written by a Leningrad chemistry teacher...