Word: stalins
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...stands nestled between his father and mother. But Kim Jong Il's childhood was hardly a settled one. He was only seven when he lost his mother. She died in labor, delivering a stillborn infant just a year after her husband was anointed leader of North Korea by Stalin's regime. The Korean War then engulfed the peninsula, and Kim Jong Il spent its duration in northeast China. Back home, he transferred from school to school before graduating from Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang in 1964. His thesis: an analysis of his father's ideas on socialist agriculture. Still...
...Manchuria years before? Could this fleshy 33-year-old be that same hero? Soon, however, no one would deny him the name. When he died last week of a heart attack brought on, according to Pyongyang, by "mental strain," Kim had not only outlasted such totalitarian contemporaries as Stalin and Mao -- both of whom were his protectors and his dupes -- but was also the first communist leader to pass on his authority dynastically. As absolute master of his impoverished half of the peninsula for 46 years, he ignited one war, threatened the same again and again, and finally caused...
Even though Stalin regarded Kim as a puppet, it was often the Korean who pulled the Soviet leader's strings. According to Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao and the Korean War, published last year by Stanford University Press with American, Russian and Chinese contributors, Kim made numerous trips to Moscow to convince Stalin that the South Koreans were ready to join his revolutionary forces. He also reinforced his Soviet patron's belief that the U.S. would never intervene in a Korean conflict. If the Americans would not help the Nationalist Chinese against Mao's forces, he argued, why would they come...
...short of arms?" Stalin asked Kim when he heard about the first / border clashes between North and South in 1950. "We'll give them to you. You must strike the southerners in the teeth." Still, Stalin warned, "if you should get kicked in the teeth, I shall not lift a finger. You have to ask Mao for all the help." Kim went to Beijing, where he convinced Mao that Stalin believed a Korean war was winnable. The Chinese leader allowed himself to be persuaded, and he promised to stand by his new ally. But Kim had miscalculated. The U.S. intervened...
More importantly, Zhirinovsky really has not posed a threat to the same degree as Hitler or Mussolini, or Stalin for that matter. Zhirinovsky likes to complain and publicly denounce democratic reforms and institution, but he offers the people no viable alternative solutions, merely an attitude of "I'll deal with it later." He enjoys the bawdy, aggressive style of politics, but he hasn't been able to firmly establish his odious cult of personality...