Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...bright, the chins are raised in cheerful pugnaciousness, the mouths always on the verge of a smile. These folks seem as jolly as TV-commercial grandparents, yet eager to raise hell one more time. Most of them were active members of the American Communist Party in the days when Stalin was Uncle Joe and the choice looked clear between fascism and Communism. Some party stalwarts helped organize labor unions. Others fought for civil rights in an age when the color barrier kept blacks out of state colleges and the World Series. Radicals lived on the barricades then: leading strikes, tangling...
...midst. Recalls Dorothy Healey, who for a quarter-century headed the party's Southern California district: "What was the meaning of life? You had that answer." But those same eyes, sparkling with conviction, could be blinkered in the face of such trifles as the Moscow trials, the Hitler-Stalin pact, the partial annexation of Finland and, later, the taking over of Eastern Europe and the reports of Gulag atrocities. It was not until 1956, and Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin, that even the most loyal of party members began to wonder how something so good turned...
...They had a blind spot," says Reichert. "Unfortunately they bought into a model without questioning it. It became their first principle to defend that country." So much so that they didn't believe reports of the Stalin purges. When the Stalin revelations became news in 1956 many of the communists became so disillusioned that they dropped out of the party. They grew more concerned with democracy. It was an ideal that many would have never dreamed of giving...
...some moments of low humor or lofty dudgeon. The author may be a bit extravagant in her criticism, as when she says that Alexander VI, the infamous Borgia Pope, was "as close to the prince of darkness as human beings are likely to come." What then of Caligula? Or Stalin? Or Hitler? But she correctly upbraids the Pontiffs for squandering the papacy's moral standing in Christendom. Whether they "provoked" the Protestant revolt, as Tuchman says, or only abetted it, they lost the respect of bishops and princes who otherwise might not have accommodated the forces of nationalism...
...finds an ingenious way to turn his obsession into a cushy government job when a Soviet laboratory purchases his prodigious production of spermatozoa for the greater glory of Communist science. In Kangaroo the author satirizes the false and often absurd confessions that were made at show trials during the Stalin era. Here an engaging professional crook admits to the rape of the oldest kangaroo in the Moscow...