Word: stalins
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...When Stalin died in 1953, he was far gone in paranoia, convinced that a cabal of Jewish doctors was trying to poison him. Only after shooting Stalin's reptilian police chief, Lavrenty Beria, did the Kremlin survivors, notably the new Communist Party Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, try to shift to a new policy known as "the thaw." In a four-hour speech before the 20th Party Congress, supposedly secret but widely leaked, Khrushchev described to the faithful for the first time the full range of Stalin's crimes. ("But where were you during all those years?" one listener asked Khrushchev, according...
...Even though in a parade of predictions in late 1988 he called the fall of the Berlin Wall, this Pulitzer-prizewinning pundit also flatly asserted last March that the Soviet Union would never brook Eastern Europe's attempts at independence. "Depend on Mr. Gorbachev to crack down as Mr. Stalin would have, fraternally rolling in the tanks and shooting the dissenters," he wrote. "The present Kremlin leader was not chosen to preside over the dissolution of the Soviet empire...
...east lies the Soviet republic of Moldavia, which Stalin created in 1940, when he annexed Bessarabia in a deal with Hitler. During the years when Ceausescu kept his people hungry and cold to sell food and fuel abroad, there was little reason for the 2 million Rumanians on the Soviet side of the border to long for home. Now, with democratic elections scheduled for April, some Moldavians have called for reunification with Rumania. Meanwhile, Rumania's newly recreated National Peasant Party has called for the return of the lost territory. To deflect just such demands, Moscow promised it would open...
...fuel economic recovery. The gesture of goodwill was combined with a hastily arranged visit to Bucharest on Saturday by Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. Moscow's solicitousness may be attributed to a desire to quell the discontent of ethnic Rumanians in the Soviet republic of Moldavia, a region Stalin annexed from Rumania in 1940. Now that Ceausescu is gone, the Kremlin has every reason to expect that secessionist fervor will be rekindled. Evidently Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev hopes Bucharest can be bribed not to fan the flames -- proof, if any were needed, that the road to reconstruction may take some...
...Mongols, Russians and Persians, Azerbaijan was divided by treaties in 1813 and 1828. Today about 6.7 million ethnic Azerbaijanis, who share a Turkic language and the Shi'ite Muslim religion, live on the Soviet side of the line and about 4 million in the adjoining Iranian province of Azerbaijan. Stalin, ever expansionist, coveted that part of Iran and moved troops into it during World War II. Before Western pressure forced him to withdraw, he encouraged Azerbaijani nationalism and rigged an "autonomous" local government in hopes the province would break away from Iran...