Word: stalins
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Very rarely does a Soviet tell the agitatori that he or she does not intend to vote. In Stalin's time, not voting literally led to a midnight knock on the door and a one-way ticket to Siberia. Now there are no overt punishments, but a notation may be entered in the non-voter's police file...
...With threats, bluster and a deafness to the word no. De Gaulle cajoled enough weapons from the Allies to arm the Free French troops, 7,000 of whom had been recruited by midsummer 1940. When he felt that Churchill and Roossevelt were neglecting him, he courted Stalin and threatened to send French forces to the Soviet front. Shut out of the planning for Dday, he retaliated by creating his own civil administration for liberated France. In the end, the general extracted just about everything he wanted from the Allies, a feat that won him the enmity of F.D.R...
Chernenko's early attempts to establish himself as a writer on ideological subjects were hampered by his lack of erudition. It is said that Mikhail Suslov, the party's chief ideologue in the post-Stalin period, had a poor opinion of Chernenko's abilities and was reluctant to let him publish articles in Kommunist, the party's main ideological publication. But after Suslov's death, in January 1982, Chernenko wrote frequently for Kommunist on general Soviet policy, especially on relations between Moscow and the foreign Communist parties. His attitude toward culture and the arts was as conservative and as ideologically...
...thing, Soviet officials had insisted that Andropov was recovering. For another, no amount of warning and contingency planning renders the actual event routine when the deceased is the leader of the Soviet Union. So it was with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev-all of whom were, like Yuri Andropov, a long time dying, and all of whose deaths occasioned not just obituaries but portentous talk of epochs and turning points. If Andropov's passing occasioned anxiety as well, it was because questions the experts have been asking for so long could still not be answered...
They either die on the job (as Lenin, Stalin and Brezhnev did), or they are thrown out and end up as pensioners in ignominy (as Georgi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev were...