Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...spite of what seemed to be inevitable doom, in spite of hundreds of thousands of fleeing party apparatchiks, Stalin remained in Moscow. In a speech on Nov. 6, 1941, the eve of the 24th anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover, he cast the enemy as beasts. "It is these people without honor or conscience, these people with the morality of animals, who have the effrontery to call for the extermination of the great Russian nation." Patriotic Russians would never let that happen. "No mercy for the German invaders," he said. In Red Square the next day, he again sought to rein...
...tyrant's appeal transfigured a shell-shocked country. Suddenly a hopeless cause became the Great Patriotic War. Even those who hated Stalin -- like the novelist Victor Nekrasov -- remember rushing into combat crying "Za rodinu, za Stalina!" (For the motherland, for Stalin!). The reanimated Russians could also count on a perennial ally: Father Winter...
...relentless march across the snow." By the time the spring thaw slowed the Russian counterattack, the Germans had been hurled entirely out of Moscow province. In the spring of 1942 they would still be close enough to threaten, but by then they had lost the battle to seize Stalin's capital...
Most Leningraders volunteered not for love of Stalin. It was their city they were defending -- the cultural center of traditional Russia, home of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Anna Akhmatova. The ordeal, however, required more than pride, certainly more than courage. The supply of food was erratic, and plummeted during the darkest moments of the war. On Dec. 23, 1941, for example, the whole city had just two days' supply of flour. At one point, rations were 1,087 calories for workers who had to man the city's strategic munitions plants, 581 calories for office workers, 684 calories for children...
...called gateway to the Caucasus, was even more ominous. The siege was embarrassingly brief, and whole Soviet units reportedly fled in panic. Suddenly the way south to the oil fields of Baku was open. With German armies simultaneously dashing to cut off the Soviet supply line along the Volga, Stalin issued a stern "not a step back" decree to the Red Army. Deserters were to be shot on sight...