Word: stalins
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When Roy Medvedev's momentous study of Stalinism, Let History Judge, was first published in the West in 1971, readers marveled. How could a Soviet citizen, laboring in Russia, have produced a work so rich in documentation, so scrupulous as scholarship and, above all, so harrowingly vivid in its recounting of the calamities inflicted by Stalin on his country? In the West there was nothing to rival it in scope. In the Soviet Union, where the book circulated among scholars, it restored a long-abandoned standard of professional integrity to Soviet historiography. As one Russian practitioner lamented, "Stalin beat...
...paid a stern price for publishing his book abroad. He was threatened with arrest, and his files were seized by the KGB in 1971 and again in 1975. His phone was cut off for a year, and all his international mail was confiscated until 1987. Still, many witnesses to Stalin's crimes, heartened by news of the book, offered Medvedev a bonanza of new information. Old Bolsheviks who had suffered at the dictator's hands came to Medvedev's Moscow apartment to bring him the unpublished memoirs they had squirreled away in despair. Victims of the Great Terror and their...
...modern Soviet era began on the night of June 3, in the city of Fergana (pop. 190,000), 150 miles southeast of Tashkent, as bands of native Uzbeks staged a series of brutal attacks on minority Meskhetian Turks, who were deported from Georgia in 1944 by Joseph Stalin. Most of the 190,000 displaced Meskhetians settled in Uzbekistan, a region that did not always welcome their presence...
...economic reforms that integrate both nations into the global marketplace, make that three cheers. Indeed, given the domestic changes launched in 1979 by Deng and in 1985 by Gorbachev and the relationship the U.S. now enjoys with both countries, a return to the threatening dogmas of the Stalin and Mao eras is difficult to envision...
...self-effacement and presumption. The diplomat and historian has written 17 books on 19th and 20th century foreign policy; he knows very well that his current "pickings" contain 61 years of incomparable observations. He was in Germany when the Nazis rose to power, and in the U.S.S.R. during Stalin's purges. Since his departure from the Foreign Service in 1953 he has visited almost every dry surface of the globe, and he has never forgotten his notebook. From it he has now culled Sketches from a Life, which brims with diverting character analyses, appraisals of nations and even attempts...