Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Soviet Union that his image was too tarnished for him to represent his country at home or abroad. A more important impediment Andropov had to surmount was the widespread fear of the KGB among Soviet officials who vividly remember the purges of party and government bureaucrats by Stalin's secret-police chiefs. Working for Andropov, however, was his record of efficiently crushing religious, intellectual and national dissent; he once dismissed the dissident movement as "a skillful propaganda invention." Yet at the same time, he managed to make the country's leaders feel secure from Stalin-like coercion...
Says Columbia University Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer: "In the 1980s the Soviet Union may pass through the worst period since the death of Stalin. Growth rates will be the lowest ever, and the population can expect a stagnating or even declining standard of living. The very stability of the social system may be in question." Observes Marshall Goldman, associate director of Harvard University's Russian Research Center: "There are problems everywhere in the economy. The Russians have to be thinking about what they fought the revolution for. They must be asking themselves, 'Was it worth...
Supreme power in the U.S.S.R. has changed hands only four times before. Vladimir Lenin died in 1924 and made way for Joseph Stalin, who died 29 years later, to be replaced briefly by Georgi Malenkov, who was outmaneuvered by Nikita Khrushchev, who in turn was ousted by Brezhnev in 1964. The changeovers in Moscow might as well have occurred on another planet. U.S. statesmen of those years had little understanding of what had happened, much less any anticipation of what was going to happen next, and still less any sense of what the U.S. could do about...
That proved another futile hope. In the next decade, Roosevelt and his advisers came to realize that they were dealing with a political system that was not only deeply repugnant to Western values but virtually impervious to Western attempts to change it. Nevertheless, compared with Nazi Germany, "Uncle Joe" Stalin's Russia seemed by far the lesser of two evils. "I can't take Communism, nor can you," said Roosevelt to Ambassador Joseph Davies in 1941. "But to cross this bridge [i.e., beat Hitler], I would hold hands with the devil...
...fallen in Iran. Taraki's policies seemed certain to ensure there would also be a massive Muslim insurrection in Afghanistan. Taraki's response was to slaughter any opposition within his reach. Moscow tried to persuade him that this was a recipe for disaster, he should not repeat Stalin's errors. Taraki told Moscow to mind its own business...