Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...author sits at a rough wooden trestle table in his country house near Moscow, thumbing through a stack of page proofs for his novel. "This book is ^ about power," he says. "Stalin was consciously aware of the uses of power, the abuses of power, how to get power and how to keep power. He could have debated with Machiavelli because he would have considered that Machiavelli knew less about power than...
...know why this century has such terrible events happen? The Turks killing two million Armenians, the Holocaust, Hitler killing most of the Jews in Europe, Stalin killing fifteen million Ukrainians, nuclear destruction unleashed, the final war apparently inevitable? It is because God agreed to let the Great Prince Satan have his way with men for a hundred years--this one hundred years, the twentieth century...
Magadan. It is a name that turns Soviet hearts to ice and evokes memories of the long ago midnight knock on the door. The port of entry to the most deadly archipelago of the Gulag system, it became a synonym for the terror Joseph Stalin visited upon the land. At least 2 million prisoners were worked to death in its gold mines and timber forests and on its road projects. Since then, with few exceptions, the city of Magadan and the vast region around it have been closed to foreigners. When the Soviets permitted a small group to visit Magadan...
...camps are gone, swallowed up by time, destalinization and the cultural amnesia of a history still unwritten. There are no longer any huts, gates, guard towers, or shuffling columns of prisoners on their way to another day of killing slave labor. There are no memorials, no cemeteries dedicated to Stalin's victims. Some of the camp names that dot the pages of prisoner memoirs are ordinary towns now: Shturmovoy, Elgen, Yagodnoye, Mylga, Magadan itself. "When you go to Magadan and stand upon the Kolyma highway," a Muscovite advised, "you must look down at the earth beneath your feet and think...
Today it is difficult to imagine the bones, the icy graves, the miseries and horrors that took place in Stalin's Magadan. Whatever it was in 1937, Magadan in 1987 is a very different place. The region's 552,000 residents are better housed, better fed, better clothed and better paid than most other Soviet citizens. The majority of them came as young volunteers in search of adventure. Many stayed for the challenge and high pay of the Arctic frontier: salaries run around 500 rubles ($750) a month, nearly triple the national average. "Like many of my friends, I came...