Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Moscow the crimes of Stalin have been reported and officially confirmed for years. The unrepentant Chinese government is still much more secretive and reluctant to provide ammunition for its critics. But two new books -- The New Emperors: China in the Era of Mao and Deng by Harrison E. Salisbury (Little, Brown; 544 pages; $24.95) and The Claws of the Dragon: Kang Sheng by John Byron and Robert Pack (Simon & Schuster; 560 pages; $27.50) -- indicate that glasnost is coming, inexorably, to Beijing. They provide the most detailed and personal accounts so far of the chaos, cruelty and corruption that Mao Zedong...
...1940s, the head of the secret police had consolidated his control over the party's social-affairs department, which had a "liquidation" division: "So notorious was Kang's taste for inflicting pain . . . it earned him a title," the King of Hell. The authors compare him with Iago, Rasputin and Stalin's secret-police chief, Lavrenti Beria. In spite of the book's rather breathless style, the analogies seem...
...TIME Covers the War: Personalities from World War II" spans the period from Jan. 3, 1938, when General and Madame Chiang Kai-shek of China were on the cover, to May 21, 1945, when Japan's Emperor Hirohito was rendered as the divine "Son of Heaven." Also included: Joseph Stalin as the 1942 Man of the Year, General Douglas MacArthur upon his triumphant return to the Philippines in October 1944 and Adolf Hitler following his suicide...
...plow through the literature of Afrocentrism is to enter a world of claims about technological innovation so absurd that they lie beyond satire, like those made for Soviet science in Stalin's time. Afrocentrists have at one time or another claimed that Egyptians, alias Africans, invented the wet-cell battery by observing electric eels in the Nile; and that late in the 1st millennium B.C., they took to flying around in gliders. (This news is based not on the discovery of an aircraft in an Egyptian tomb but on a silhouette wooden votive sculpture of the god Horus, a falcon...
Sometimes the communist rulers revised their pantheon of heroes and cities as politics changed: Stalingrad, originally Czaritsin, became Volgograd after Joseph Stalin's crimes were made public in the 1960s. (Another Soviet joke: After the change from Stalingrad was announced, the Kremlin supposedly received a cable that read, I CONCUR WITH THE CRITICISM OF THE COMRADES. SIGNED: JOSEPH VOLGIN...