Word: stalins
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...assistance, began dismantling many of Khrushchev's more quixotic experiments, especially those that weakened the power of the Communist Party. Restrictions on private farming were eased, and wages were increased. At the same time, Brezhnev subtly moved back toward some policies that were reminiscent of the Stalin years. Arrests and deportations gradually extinguished the dissident movement. Some future historians may mark Brezhnev's expulsion in 1974 of Nobel-prize-winning Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn as one of the most significant events of the Soviet leader's long reign...
...Ministers building, they knew what they were there to do. They would ratify the choice already made by the Politburo, that of Yuri Andropov, 68, to be Brezhnev's successor as party chief. The post has been held by only five men since the Bolshevik Revolution: Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Georgi Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Shortly after noon Friday, Andropov, the son of a railroad worker from the northern Caucasus, became the sixth...
...attracted Brezhnev's attention, however, and he felled it with a single shot." Brezhnev probably understood the quarry because the quarry was so like himself. The difference was that Brezhnev had no Brezhnev in the Soviet hierarchy to shoot him down; he saw to that. Neither Lenin nor Stalin nor Khrushchev, he had nothing sudden, nothing revolutionary, about him. Yet all three of his predecessors were contained in him. He gave stolidity to his country's history...
...monarchs of the whole world. He uses his authority as much over ecclesiastics as laymen, and holds unlimited control over the lives and property of all his subjects: not one of his counselors has sufficient authority to dare to oppose him." Was he describing a Tsar or a Stalin? The power alone is not unfathomable. The country itself seems both to seek subjugation and to struggle against it. It takes a special kind of oppressor to succeed in such a place. Like Brezhnev, he must appear to have sprung from the soil and descended from the sky simultaneously. He must...
...grandchildren." Said an engineer: "We used to complain some, bitch about this and that, and tell jokes about the old man. But now that Brezhnev is dead I feel sad because he conveyed a sense of security and stability." One middle-aged Russian intellectual recalled a different scene, when Stalin lay in state in the House of Trade Unions. Then the streets outside were packed with an unruly mob of people pushing their way toward the hall. "Stalin was like a god to them," he explained. "They were swarming around trying to see the dead god. But Brezhnev was human...