Word: vozhd
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...National Leader," or "Vozhd" in Russian, takes precedence over the constitutional head of state in the country's political tradition. Gryzlov pointedly used the English word "leader," rather than its Russian equivalent of Vozhd - because the Russian term is still closely associated with Stalin. The careful choice of words doesn't change the message, though. Indeed, some 70 years ago, urban legend has it that a little boy asked his father about Stalin. The father duly explained that Stalin was this country's Vozhd. "That's weird," the precocious progeny mused aloud. "I gathered from books that only primordial tribes...
...Russia has a formally constitutional government. But it also has Putin - the Vozhd whose authority supersedes all formal structures...
...Trotski proved indispensable to the regime he had helped install. Back in 1929, Stalin forcibly exiled the erstwhile Bolshevik Number 2 from the Soviet Union, and turned him into the epitome of all the horror that threatened the Soviet Motherland, the bogeyman that the people must rally around the Vozhd to oppose. Moscow show trials were built on alleged ties of the "criminal trotskiite underground" to their exiled principal. All the ills and failures of the Soviet society were explained by the plotting of "trotskiite wreckers." Even after Stalin's agent murdered Trotski with an ice-pick in Mexico...
...General Secretary of the Communist Party, Stalin appeared, calculatedly, to be simply an organization man. But he was far more than that because he had perfected the technique of using the details of organization to amass political power. Once he became the vozhd, the master, he ruthlessly annihilated all those who once were loyal to Lenin and all who might consider questioning his authority...
...with five gold stars as a Hero of the Soviet Union and of Socialist Labor, his country's equivalent of both the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Brezhnev's colleagues in the Politburo had even been known to refer to him as vozhd (roughly, great leader), a title previously given only to Lenin and Stalin. Privately, Soviets joked about the cult of personality that gradually surrounded their President as he fought against the inexorable frailties of old age. It was said, for example, that he had even outdone Stalin in the matter...