Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...presumed Chernenko was ill, but who knew how ill? They don't give health bulletins here, you know. This isn't America; we feed on news from the grapevine. So it was a surprise to hear he had actually died. Still, things haven't changed much since the Stalin days. Ever since, we have had a more or less collectivized government leadership, and things seem to jog along comfortably enough. Who expects changes? And what kind of changes? By and large, one leader is much the same as another...
...West does know about the Soviet Union is that the people who run it cling to their posts either until their comrades turn against them and throw them out, as happened with Georgi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev, or until Comrade Death intervenes, as occurred with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and, last week, with Konstantin Chernenko. One of the more ironic flaws of the Soviet system is that while it is dedicated to the acquisition, consolidation and extension of power, while it prides itself on discipline and the subordination of the individual to the institution...
...began in Brezhnev's declining years, had come to an abrupt end. A small circle of aging leaders, men whose careers spanned most of their nation's history, had handed over power to someone from the younger generation, an event as monumental in its way as the death of Stalin in 1953. The Kremlin no longer could be viewed as the domain of ailing and absent rulers; its boss was now a man of vigor who might well lead the Soviet Union into the 21st century...
...theory, the conceptual breakthrough has been restricted to the economy; in practice, it has begun to affect other areas of national life. Not just Marx but Lenin and Stalin too, China's dialecticians are now saying, could not possibly have foreseen today's global and national realities. Their theories, it is argued, should thus no longer be treated as sacred truth...
Soon enough, the front began to disintegrate. Charges were made of unfair distribution of arms which short changed anarchist militia units. The Trotskyites and other groups opposed the conservative economic policies of the regime, and small military clashes were reported. As Stalin's purges got underway in the USSR, the Spanish government began to harass, threaten and even assassinate members of the left revolutionary groups...