Word: stalins
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...they may very well do just that, by electing a Communist as their President. What would induce a people to take such a step? The Russians have enjoyed unprecedented tastes of freedom over the past few years, and the process began so hopefully, even heroically. Now the descendants of Stalin's victims are poised to welcome as their rulers the heirs of Stalin's politics. Will they do so? Or will they pause at the brink? On the following pages TIME explores the reasons for the trouble in the Russian soul, the fierce campaign for the presidency and what...
...better in the last five years. But if people are living better in objective terms, their subjective sense is that things have got worse. Even those who have become rich and traveled the world have a hankering for the past, when you had the illusion that someone--whether Stalin, the party or your trade union leader--was always thinking of you, and your chunk of kolbasa was guaranteed, even if you had to stand in line...
Gennadi Zyuganov's great achievement has been broadening his Communist base to include many who oppose Yeltsin's reforms, including "national patriots" who yearn for the empire's restoration, hard-line Bolsheviks who idolize Stalin, red capitalists who own casinos in Moscow, and "social-democratic" intellectuals. "Creating that coalition was our first priority, and it is why we never refer to Zyuganov as the Communist candidate," says Valentin Kuptsov, Zyuganov's campaign manager and Communist Party deputy. But "Zyuganov is not merely a tactical nationalist," says James Billington, a Russia scholar and currently the U.S. Librarian of Congress...
This means that, while he didn't dare speak out on behalf of persecuted writers like Babel, Mandelstam or Anna Akhmatova during the Stalin years, Ehrenburg worked assiduously to resurrect their reputations in the more lenient Khrushchev period. As Rubinstein documents, Ehrenburg used his position as the Soviet writer best known to the Western intelligentsia in order to blackmail the censors: he would repeatedly announce the publication of a controversial book or article, then protest that its failure to appear due to censorship would reflect badly on the Soviet regime in the West...
...also true that Ehrenburg protested the regime's abuses as far as he could without losing his privileged position. He refused to sign the most egregiously pro-Stalin public statements of his fellow writers, worked hard to document the Nazi massacre of Jews despite official Soviet disapproval, and was one of the first public figures to speak out against Stalin after his death, in his novel The Thaw...