Word: unionizers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Soviet citizen, laboring in Russia, have produced a work so rich in documentation, so scrupulous as scholarship and, above all, so harrowingly vivid in its recounting of the calamities inflicted by Stalin on his country? In the West there was nothing to rival it in scope. In the Soviet Union, where the book circulated among scholars, it restored a long-abandoned standard of professional integrity to Soviet historiography. As one Russian practitioner lamented, "Stalin beat out of us the capacity to think independently and to doubt, without which there is no search for truth...
...after reading, reflecting, rewriting and adding 100,000 words, Medvedev has turned Let History Judge into virtually a new book. Coincidentally, Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost has nudged the door ajar for its publication in the Soviet Union; abbreviated versions of four chapters were printed early this year in the magazine Znamya. Last month Medvedev came even closer to acceptance in his homeland when he was elected to both the new Congress of People's Deputies and the Supreme Soviet, the nation's parliament...
...could such a monster gain absolute ascendancy over the Soviet Union? In this book Medvedev backs away from his earlier position that Stalinism was essentially an aberration on the road to a more benevolent Communism envisioned by Lenin. The historian has re-examined the totalitarian system created by Lenin and now suspects that Stalinism sprang from Leninism, as many American Sovietologists have concluded. Though Medvedev never fully confronts this issue, he emphatically makes one crucial point: when Lenin banned all opposition groups and factions in 1921, the ensuing one-party dictatorship was "a very important condition for Stalin's usurpation...
...very act of revelation is a central feature in the gradual loosening of Communist strictures that Mikhail Gorbachev is bringing to the Soviet Union, as he grapples with the challenge of revamping the system without completely violating it -- and a stark contrast to the refusal of China's leadership to countenance the slightest openness...
...incompetence, irresponsibility, mismanagement," the grim and angry President told the Congress. "It was nothing less than a shameful outrage. There will be no progress in this country if we have such laxness." Gorbachev then exhorted his listeners to "learn hard lessons from what happened." Last week in the Soviet Union, there was no shortage of hard lessons...