Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this point probably only some loose association like the proposed commonwealth, without any true central government, can bring the republics together at all. But the difficulties of making it work are immense. Of all people, Joseph Stalin gave the most eerily prophetic description. When the Soviet Union was founded on Dec. 30, 1922, he enumerated the conditions attending its birth: "devastated fields, factories at standstill, destroyed productive powers and exhausted economic resources render insufficient the separate efforts of separate republics in economic reconstruction." The union is now dying of exactly the same ills, and its heirs have yet to prove...
...character is entering a city, he must use the right bridges of the period, he must enter the proper gates. On the streets he must meet the people of the time.... Sometimes this [research] was not a problem. For example, the Inquisition, which was repressive in the manner of Stalin's police or the Gestapo, was also very methodic. In their documents they recorded everything they did. They list every name and every accusation. I made use of such documents...
Stalingrad, a great sprawl of a city on the Volga, became the focal point of the struggle. It had originally been named Tsaritsyn, and during the bloody civil war it was successfully defended against the rightist White Army by Stalin himself, who gave it his name. The Russians knew that if they did not tie down the Germans at Stalingrad, the war would virtually be lost. Not only would the huge cities of the north be bereft of supplies from the fertile south, but the oil fields of Baku that fueled the Russian war machine would fall to the Wehrmacht...
From mid-July 1942 onward, the fighting intensified as the Germans advanced along the great bend of the Don River. Hitler ordered the German Sixth Army to conquer Stalingrad by Aug. 25. Stalin ordered the city to prepare for siege...
Almost immediately after Operation Barbarossa was launched in June 1941, Stalin began imploring Churchill -- and, after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt -- to open a second front in Europe to draw German forces away from Russia. The pressure from Moscow was especially intense during the battle for Stalingrad. Even after the German advance was halted and reversed in 1943, Stalin continued to declare that as mighty as the revived Red Army was, it could...