Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Khrushchev's revelation of Stalin's crimes antagonized the KGB. The military resented his decision to reduce excess manpower in the army, forcing a large number of officers into retirement. His adventure in Cuba had ended in disgrace...
Gromyko inhabits a cocoon as though born to it. I do not believe he has ever had close friends. Inside the Stalin-era skyscraper that houses the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Trade, Gromyko takes a special elevator, reserved for him and a few very senior officials, straight to his seventh-floor office. There, except for a meal in a private dining room, he stays all day, reading those documents that Makarov and others on his personal staff feel it is essential to show him, seeing a carefully screened group of senior ministry officials...
Meanwhile, a partial rehabilitation of Stalin was under way in the Soviet Union as the country prepared to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the 1945 victory over Nazi Germany. For the first time since 1956, Stalin was being praised as a strategic genius and a superb wartime commander in chief. Says Stalin Biographer Robert C. Tucker: "The Soviet authorities evidently thought it was a good time for Stalin's daughter to come home." No doubt they were aware of her emotional turmoil. Anticipating that an official emissary from Moscow would be rebuffed by Svetlana, they apparently decided...
Last month the authorities moved Svetlana out of Moscow, in an apparent effort to insulate her from contact with diplomats and other foreigners to whom she might complain. Mother and daughter were dispatched 1,000 miles south to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, not far from Stalin's birthplace. Svetlana was given a modest apartment but no car, dacha or any of the other perquisites that families of the Soviet elite enjoy...
...returned, drawn to a specter she could not elude. "It was as though my father was at the center of a black circle," she wrote in 1963. "Anyone who ventured inside vanished or perished or was destroyed in one way or another." The question is whether, three decades after Stalin's death, the circle will close around his daughter and granddaughter...