Word: stalins
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Taking the trans-Siberian across Stalin's Russia in 1935 was a tense and dreary experience. Thousands were dying of famine and purges and the country was wracked by economic and social chaos. Anxious to hide as much as possible from their foreign travelers. Soviet officials stopped the train at Baiku on the excuse that a log had fallen across the tracks--and held it there for 12 hours. "The result," Tuchman recalls, "was that we hit every station thereafter in the middle of the night--and didn't see anything...
Tuchman got her only sense of the country from a fierce argument with a Siberian schoolteacher she met on the train. The woman had taught her self English, the two got into a "terrific argument" about "who was better known, Stalin or FDR." As Tuchman recalls, "She thought the Soviets had invented everything--including neon lights...
...became obvious that the Russian Revolution would not be followed by similar uprisings in the West, leaders of the Soviet Union quickly abandoned the Leninist concept of a people's militia in a well-equipped standing army that would ardently defend "socialism in one country." Upon accession to power, Stalin committed the Soviet Union to "catching and overtaking the capitalist countries." Holloway finds the early roots of the arms race. As he goes on to show, the surprise German attack on Russia in June 1941 left an indelible mark on the minds of Soviet strategists, who have since determined never...
...arms contest, according to the author, came in the post-war settlements. In contrast to Americans who believed that the newly developed and used atomic bomb had little leverage in U.S. foreign policy, the Soviets viewed the mighty weapon as the Allies' means to extract concessions from Stalin. Thus began the familiar pattern of Soviet attempts to match Western technological and military breakthroughs...
...been discovered in the old Truman house in Independence. One batch has been collated by Indiana University Professor Robert Ferrell. It covers the first two years of Truman's courtship, when he described wrestling ornery calves, and the first year of his presidency, when he wrestled with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill at the Potsdam conference. The most significant revelation: Truman, contrary to some speculation, was sincere in his effort to get the Soviet Union involved in fighting Japan. Among the nuggets...