Word: stalins
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...book chronicles in excruciating detail the sordid Machiavellianism of the Comintern during Stalin's dictatorship, focusing on its already well--documented betrayal of the Republican Spanish government during the 1935-1938 civil war against Generslisimo Francisco Franco. It also shows that Stalin's idea of "socialism in one country" at the expense of the international resolutionary movement can lead only to the abandonment of worker democracy and the disintegration into state capitalism. Under state capitalism, communist countries must oppress their own workers in order to compete with capitalist nations. The Soviet Union had followed this path away from genuine socialism...
...terrorists whose specialty is mokrie dela (wet affairs), from the so-called Department V, the KGB's Executive Action Department. I had naively assumed that political murders, kidnapings, sabotage targeted against Western civilian sectors had been pretty much abandoned by the U.S.S.R. by the mid-1950s, after the Stalin-Beria era. I was wrong. I met some of those operatives when I first lived in New York as a junior diplomat...
Khrushchev's revelation of Stalin's crimes antagonized the KGB. The military resented his decision to reduce excess manpower in the army, forcing a large number of officers into retirement. His adventure in Cuba had ended in disgrace...
Gromyko inhabits a cocoon as though born to it. I do not believe he has ever had close friends. Inside the Stalin-era skyscraper that houses the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Trade, Gromyko takes a special elevator, reserved for him and a few very senior officials, straight to his seventh-floor office. There, except for a meal in a private dining room, he stays all day, reading those documents that Makarov and others on his personal staff feel it is essential to show him, seeing a carefully screened group of senior ministry officials...
...that time, Khrushchev was facing opposition at home. The Stalinists who survived the purges of the '30s were the sternest guardians of Communist doctrine, and they often grumbled about Khrushchev. One of them was Tsarapkin's deputy and my superior, Kirill Novikov. Along with Tsarapkin, Novikov had sat behind Stalin during the Potsdam Conference in 1945. He would reveal himself in the way he reminisced: "In Stalin's time we had real order. There were none of these rhetorical flourishes and vacillations." Moscow was rife with gossip about intrigues. A clique in the Presidium (Khrushchev's name for the Politburo...