Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Ministers building, they knew what they were there to do. They would ratify the choice already made by the Politburo, that of Yuri Andropov, 68, to be Brezhnev's successor as party chief. The post has been held by only five men since the Bolshevik Revolution: Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Georgi Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Shortly after noon Friday, Andropov, the son of a railroad worker from the northern Caucasus, became the sixth...
...monarchs of the whole world. He uses his authority as much over ecclesiastics as laymen, and holds unlimited control over the lives and property of all his subjects: not one of his counselors has sufficient authority to dare to oppose him." Was he describing a Tsar or a Stalin? The power alone is not unfathomable. The country itself seems both to seek subjugation and to struggle against it. It takes a special kind of oppressor to succeed in such a place. Like Brezhnev, he must appear to have sprung from the soil and descended from the sky simultaneously. He must...
...grandchildren." Said an engineer: "We used to complain some, bitch about this and that, and tell jokes about the old man. But now that Brezhnev is dead I feel sad because he conveyed a sense of security and stability." One middle-aged Russian intellectual recalled a different scene, when Stalin lay in state in the House of Trade Unions. Then the streets outside were packed with an unruly mob of people pushing their way toward the hall. "Stalin was like a god to them," he explained. "They were swarming around trying to see the dead god. But Brezhnev was human...
Such a vast change of politicians and administrators has not occurred in the Soviet Union since the great purges of the late 1930s, when thousands of powerful bureaucrats were shot or dispatched to the gulag on Stalin's orders. This time, however, the scourge is not a paranoid and murderous dictator. It is old age. Most top officials in the country's ruling bodies are the same age as the majority of Politburo members: in their 60s and 70s. Roy Medvedev, the independent-minded Marxist historian living in Moscow, believes that younger men will move into top positions around...
Sovietologists who have analyzed the backgrounds of the rising generation of leaders have drawn a number of conclusions about them. Unlike their predecessors, the upcoming leaders entered politics after Stalin's death in 1953, thus escaping the paralyzing effects of mass police terror and participation in the dictator's crimes. As a result, they may be less fearful, more self-confident and assertive, than the Brezhnev generation. Though the younger men are completely loyal to the Soviet system, they are less suspicious and more curious about the outside world. Better educated than the old rulers, many of whom attended only...