Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...book chronicles in excruciating detail the sordid Machiavellianism of the Comintern during Stalin's dictatorship, focusing on its already well--documented betrayal of the Republican Spanish government during the 1935-1938 civil war against Generslisimo Francisco Franco. It also shows that Stalin's idea of "socialism in one country" at the expense of the international resolutionary movement can lead only to the abandonment of worker democracy and the disintegration into state capitalism. Under state capitalism, communist countries must oppress their own workers in order to compete with capitalist nations. The Soviet Union had followed this path away from genuine socialism...
...intent of the book is clear throughout it charts the submergence of the long cherished communist goal of world revolution into the much of Soviet internal affairs under Stalin According to Carr, the original plan for the defense of a fledgling Spanish socialist government against the rebel Fascists and the advancement of the communist movement there was scrapped in the name of political expediency. As Carr puts it in his conclusion, the "united front," which joined Spanish socialists and communists under Moscow's guidance, gave was to a "popular front," with which the Spanish left was ordered to embrace...
Because of Stalin's desire to attain a rapprochement with the West as the spectre of German and Italian militarism grew large the Spanish government became expendable Carr quotes a Soviet intelligence officer's account of a split in the Comintern between those that feared to provoke the animosity of France (these included Stalin), and those who felt that there was no moral choice but to come to the defense of the Republic These last Stalin branded as Protskyites...
...terrorists whose specialty is mokrie dela (wet affairs), from the so-called Department V, the KGB's Executive Action Department. I had naively assumed that political murders, kidnapings, sabotage targeted against Western civilian sectors had been pretty much abandoned by the U.S.S.R. by the mid-1950s, after the Stalin-Beria era. I was wrong. I met some of those operatives when I first lived in New York as a junior diplomat...
...that time, Khrushchev was facing opposition at home. The Stalinists who survived the purges of the '30s were the sternest guardians of Communist doctrine, and they often grumbled about Khrushchev. One of them was Tsarapkin's deputy and my superior, Kirill Novikov. Along with Tsarapkin, Novikov had sat behind Stalin during the Potsdam Conference in 1945. He would reveal himself in the way he reminisced: "In Stalin's time we had real order. There were none of these rhetorical flourishes and vacillations." Moscow was rife with gossip about intrigues. A clique in the Presidium (Khrushchev's name for the Politburo...