Word: stalins
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...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...
RUSSIA. "Since 1917 we have been living under the occupation of Jewish fascists," says Valeri Yemelyanov, leader of one of several so-called patriotic groups. His view is totally false: though some leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution were Jewish, Joseph Stalin and his successors practiced anti-Semitism almost as zealously as the czars. No matter: many Russians are looking for someone to blame for the shortages and hunger that have followed the collapse of communism, and some are finding that all-purpose, historic scapegoat, the Jew. Others focus on the Central Asians and residents of the Caucasus area who sell...
...before, so as not to damage his standing with the conservative wing. And when demonstrators call for "Gorbachev on trial!," this is also a victory for him. He was the first Russian ruler to allow himself to be mocked. Why was there never a demonstration calling for trials of Stalin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev in their lifetimes...
...about who, for better or worse, had the most impact on the course of history in a given year. The list includes people with indisputable credentials for goodness, like Mahatma Gandhi and the American G.I., but also some of the century's worst despots, like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin...