Word: ukrainians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Taking Over. In the Ukraine, Khrushchev (at 43) became absolute boss of a country three times the size of England and almost as populous. He spoke Russian with a phony Ukrainian accent, put on an embroidered Ukrainian shirt and wore a kartuz (workingman's cap). He went everywhere, bawling out party organizers, bureaucrats and collective farm managers, but he listened carefully to the agricultural experts sent in from Moscow. He exchanged quips with the farmers, drank buckets of vodka, and got a laugh out of most situations. Behind the facade of bonhomie he was ruthlessly liquidating all who stood...
...Khrushchev's principal and most expert job was reconstructing the Ukrainian Communist Party. The old leaders, including his predecessor Stanislav Kossior, were executed, and the membership recast. The new party was a tight, tough instrument of Stalinist policy...
...change of plan. Again Stalin had got Malenkov to say no, with the result that Kharkov was lost and the overextended Red army driven back across the Don. The old dictator had also treated him contemptuously, Khrushchev complained, called him Khokhol, a derogatory Russian name for a Ukrainian. "Khokhol, dance the gopak," Stalin had ordered at a Kremlin party. The gopak is a fast, vigorous Ukrainian dance, and the 52-year-old Nikita had danced it. Stalin, in his last days, said Khrushchev tearfully, "was so sickly suspicious and obsessed" that he often looked at people like Khrushchev and asked...
...Stalinist distortions of the past, First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan, the clever Armenian economist, singled out the name of an all-but-forgotten Stalin victim named Kossior as an example of the kind of injustice done by one-man leaders. What made his name significant was that Kossior, a Ukrainian leader who lost out in the late '30s, was purged so that Nikita Khrushchev could get his job. The new collective leaders are not above such instructive hints to one another...
...Komsomol (Young Communist) at the age of 17, he rose to be a regimental commander in the Red army, but in the early '30s transferred to the Osoby Otdel (Special Department) of the NKVD. Sent to the Ukraine, he worked with Stalin's Ukrainian troubleshooter, Nikita Khrushchev. Together they supervised the deportation and liquidation of hundreds of thousands of peasants who resisted collectivization. After the conquest and partition of Poland, Serov was assigned to the job of eliminating "anti-Soviet elements" in the newly annexed territories. Infamous secret order No. 001223, outlining procedures to be adopted for executions...