Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There has always been an enormous imperial drive from Russia. To think that this is only a consequence of Communist ideology is just mistaken. The greatest periods of expansion of the Russian empire happened under the tsars. Stalin was, so to speak, rather modest at the end of World
...Erofeev's situation. Having somehow missed Petushki altogether, he is hopelessly back in Moscow. The alcoholic haze dissipates, and the Kremlin looms up as a terrifying symbol of reality. At his absurd journey's end he is crucified by four shodowy figures--one of them an unmistakable echo of Stalin...
Taking the trans-Siberian across Stalin's Russia in 1935 was a tense and dreary experience. Thousands were dying of famine and purges and the country was wracked by economic and social chaos. Anxious to hide as much as possible from their foreign travelers. Soviet officials stopped the train at Baiku on the excuse that a log had fallen across the tracks--and held it there for 12 hours. "The result," Tuchman recalls, "was that we hit every station thereafter in the middle of the night--and didn't see anything...
Tuchman got her only sense of the country from a fierce argument with a Siberian schoolteacher she met on the train. The woman had taught her self English, the two got into a "terrific argument" about "who was better known, Stalin or FDR." As Tuchman recalls, "She thought the Soviets had invented everything--including neon lights...
...arms contest, according to the author, came in the post-war settlements. In contrast to Americans who believed that the newly developed and used atomic bomb had little leverage in U.S. foreign policy, the Soviets viewed the mighty weapon as the Allies' means to extract concessions from Stalin. Thus began the familiar pattern of Soviet attempts to match Western technological and military breakthroughs...