Word: stalins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...after most of the disinformation and half-truths have been sifted out, Andropov remains an unknown quantity. What is clear is that his rise to power has coincided with the gradual evolution of the Soviet Union as a modern police state in which the physical terror of the Stalin era has been largely replaced with subtler forms of control. The KGB has developed into an increasingly sophisticated instrument for advancing national interests around the world. As head of the KGB, Andropov had much to do with those changes. Now that he holds the top party job, he has given every...
Ironically, Andropov may owe his rise to the bungling of one of the nation's most notorious secret police chiefs, Lavrenti Beria. After the death of Stalin in 1953, the tiny Georgian with the trademark pincenez tried to bully his way to power by incorporating the Ministry of the Interior into his vast security empire. That incautious move roused a vengeance-minded Politburo to action. Beria was arrested and executed. First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, in a famous secret speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956, vowed that the state security forces would be subservient to the principles of "revolutionary...
...gradual "politicization" of the KGB. He took over a security service still demoralized after several reorganizations. Andropov set about winning friends among the power groups hostile to the secret police. The military, for example, has been a traditional KGB rival. Security police ruthlessly purged the military high command on Stalin's orders in 1937, and uniformed KGB agents still riddle the armed services at all levels, a power unto themselves. It was a measure of Andropov's political skill that he managed to form an alliance with Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, a crucial maneuver in his rise...
...imprisoned, as in Stalin's time, but their careers will go nowhere...
...promising writer whose early fiction appeared in the 1960s in Novy Mir, the respected Soviet literary monthly, Vladimov has not had a word published in the Soviet Union since July 1969. His fiction evidently drew too accurate a portrait of how Stalin's shadow still hangs over the Soviet system. His best-known novel in the West, Faithful Ruslan, an imaginative story about a labor-camp guard dog who finds he cannot live in a world without prisoners, is available only to Soviets willing to risk passing along hand-typed copies...