Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What binds these strongly independent men is a warm personal admiration-and, of course, a powerful common interest in resisting Hitler. The letters graphically show how that interest leads them into their thorny alliance with Joseph Stalin. In what must be one of the harshest summit conferences ever endured, Churchill goes to Moscow in 1942 to inform Stalin that the Western Allies cannot possibly open a second front in France that year. "We argued for about two hours," Churchill reports to Roosevelt, "during which he said many disagreeable things, especially about our being too much afraid of fighting the Germans...
...capitalism, the ripping away of their markets, their profits, an end to the despotic rule of the landlords, bosses, military, and the specter of workers and peasants taking power--as was done in 1917 in Russia under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party. Despite the bureaucratic degeneration led by Stalin, the economic gains of the Russian Revolution remain and must be defended against imperialist counter-revolution...
...Tsypkin denounced stereotypes portrayed by the American media. "That cliche about the Russians always being invaded is silly. The invasions brought Russia the greatest land empire in the world! And all the talk about the 20 million dead in World War II, how that affected the people. Stalin killed about 30 million and you don't hear much talk about that...
Markov had been his country's leading novelist and playwright; he had also served a term during the Stalin years, in the Bulgarian Gulag. His prison experiences and literary skills combined to produce the scabrous picture of a nation enslaved. Yet in the eyes of the Bulgarian leadership that was not Markov's worst crime against the state. On Radio Free Europe the defector offered a description of Bulgarian President Todor Zhivkov, a smiling brute on the order of Nikita Khrushchev. At a banquet the author catches the official acting like a Balkan Queen of Hearts, shouting...
...account of the couple's decisive journey to the U.S.S.R. blandly echoes the letters Herbst was writing home at the time. Russians in the street look "vital and alert." The workers' kitchens are "so shining." This was the year of the great famine, a direct result of Stalin's enforced collectivization. Though Herbst may have been shielded from the grislier effects of the mass starvation that cost 6 million peasant lives, she could not have failed to see what other travelers were reporting: hordes of hollow-eyed families begging at every railway station. The only work Herbst...