Word: stalins
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...power. The prodigious achievements of the U.S.S.R. in mining, agriculture and energy production still conjure up images of the infamous Siberian mines, collective farms and hydroelectric projects of the 1930s, where armies of political prisoners, conscript peasants and idealistic volunteers "built Communism" under the cruel supervision of Joseph Stalin's armed guards and commissars. Today's reality is less harsh, but the profile of the country still bulges with muscle; the recitation of its endowments and achievements is still redolent of brute force, monumentality and projects that dwarf and sometimes devour...
...since the revolution," says British Historian Leonard Schapiro. Nikita Khrushchev, while a much more sympathetic figure in many ways, ordered reforms one day, crackdowns the next, and engaged, as his comrades-turned-usurpers charged, in "harebrained schemes." His was a manic-depressive leadership. Before him were 25 years of Stalin's government by massacre. The toll: at least 20 million dead in camps, prisons and famines. Before that, the civil war, the revolution, and centuries of upheaval under the Tsars...
...grocery stores or underwear in the department stores. Nor have they loosened the reins of repression during the past 16 years. At the same time, however, material conditions are easier, and life has settled into a consistent, predictable norm that avoids the extremes of Khrushchev's erratic liberalization and Stalin's relentless terror. For many Soviets, that is reassuring, especially against the backdrop of their country's new prestige and power abroad...
...ever set out on the warpath with less visible weaponry than Solzhenitsyn. Imprisoned in the Gulag from 1945 to 1953, he was one of the 5 million prisoners released from the camps during the three years following Stalin's death in 1953. In 1961 he was teaching school in a provincial Soviet town, living in obscurity, indeed in oblivion. His existence as a writer literally lay underground. In order to hide his work from the police, he buried two novels, One Day and The First Circle, two plays, a movie scenario and 12,000 lines of verse...
...sensed his opportunity in Khrushchev's second, resounding de-Stalinization speech in 1961. Unearthing One Day and departing for Moscow, he embarked on a series of masterly intrigues designed to interest Khrushchev in publishing his harrowing tale of the Stalinist camps. Exactly one year later his scheme succeeded; ultimately, the novel was published in editions totaling 921,000 copies, encouraging many Soviet citizens to expect and even to demand punishment of officials still in power who had shared in Stalin's crimes...