Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There is also no confusion of crime and error. True contrition does not permit the phrase "Stalin's errors." Such a formulation implies that a tendency to mass murder constitutes not a moral but an intellectual failing. Hence the companion formulation that attributes crimes to choosing an "incorrect line," the moral equivalent of taking a wrong turn on a highway...
...with the need for contrition, they can manage only a growl and a blank stare. Such is the case in the petrified remains of the burned-out revolutionary states, in what Philosopher Michael Walzer calls the "failed totalitarianism" that is descended from the classic, frenzied model of Hitler and Stalin and Mao. Such is the case in the Kremlin, which had already put its frozen heart on display with its stunningly barren funeral for Leonid Brezhnev, and now showed the world that it is no more able to mourn others than to mourn...
...venal hirelings in the pay of the capitalist enemy. Some went silently to the cellar. Some, like Molotov in his days as premier, stepped uncomplainingly aside and lived on, even rising to high power again. But nobody before had ever fallen as Georgy Malenkov, once the presumed heir to Stalin's dictatorship, fell last week...
Poland is scarcely more convincing as history than it is as fiction. Oversimplifications and omissions abound. Clearly, the research received from the local authorities suffers from the twin failings of modern Polish historiography: Communist rewriting of history and nationalist bias. Michener all but ignores the division of Poland between Stalin and Hitler in 1939. And he does not mention the Nazi slaughter of Polish underground forces and civilians during the 1944 Warsaw uprising, as the Red Army stood by across the river from the capital...
According to Medvedev's unofficial sources in the Soviet Union, supporters of Brezhnev's hand-picked successor, Konstantin Chernenko, counterattacked by floating a rumor that Andropov was not Russian but half Armenian and a quarter Jewish. Since Stalin's death there has been an unwritten Kremlin rule that the party chief must be an ethnic Russian. In Medvedev's view, the tactics used by Chernenko's supporters were mere pinpricks to Andropov, who had gained the crucial support in the Politburo of Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov...