Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Many East European emigre groups in the U.S. are aghast at any reliance on the U.S.S.R. With unfaded memories of the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states in 1940 and Stalin's man-made famine that some say killed 6 million in the Ukraine in the 1930s, they argue that at the close of the war the Red Army seized unused German stationery, blank military forms, typewriters, inks and stamps, all useful for producing forged documents. They charge that the Soviet Union has fabricated evidence as a way to intimidate fervently anti-Communist East Europeans settled...
...Moscow Trials of 1936 were, he recalls, "a decisive turning point in my own intellectual and political development . . . I never suspected that ((Stalin)) and the Soviet regime were prepared to violate every fundamental norm of human decency that had been woven into the texture of civilized life." Some friends and colleagues remained lockstep Stalinists, and Hook brings them onstage as object lessons. Lincoln Steffens had famously seen the future in the U.S.S.R. and proclaimed that it worked. It was less well known, notes the author, that Steffens "had previously seen it in Italy . . . where he thought it had also worked...
...program of economic and political reforms -- and with good reason. They realize that copying the Soviet policies would effectively repudiate their own. The men who control the six Warsaw Pact countries remember the last time such wrenching change took place in the Kremlin. In 1956, after Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin, unrest swept Eastern Europe. Workers rioted in Poland, and a Hungarian rebellion had to be put down by Soviet troops. Notes one Polish journalist: "Everyone just holds his breath and waits for what will happen next...
Rumania remains fundamentally opposed to reform. More than two decades of rule by Nicolae Ceausescu, 69, has dismantled a once vigorous economy, created serious food shortages and established the most repressive police force in the Soviet bloc since Stalin. Ceausescu is adamantly against the reforms he sees in Moscow. Said he in a speech in January: "There is no way one can speak about socialist perfection and at the same time advocate so-called market socialism and free competition...
...current Five-Year Plan. The conference would, in effect, be an extraordinary session of the quinquennial Soviet Party Congress, the most recent of which occurred last year. Such special meetings have been held before, but they are by no means regular events. The last one was called by Stalin...