Word: stalinism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...with plans to cut Chechnya's electricity supply. More alarming, perhaps, is Putin's announcement on Monday that the refugees will be resettled in those parts of Chechnya now under Russian control. After all, the last Russian leader to move whole populations around the Caucasus like chess pieces was Stalin...
...Orwell wrote a simple beast fable about a revolution devolving from idealism ("All animals are equal") to oppression ("...but some animals are more equal than others"). It's a sign of Animal Farm's power that it has never been wholly palatable. During World War II, the manuscript--painting Stalin as the (literally) piggish dictator who co-opts a barnyard revolution against humans--spooked publishers because the Soviets were allies against the Nazis. By the time an animated film was made, in 1955, the tale wasn't anti-pinko enough, so a propagandistic anti-swine uprising was added. The cold...
...consorting with Stalin-esque killers in Kosovo? Quite possibly, according to allegations published Friday by the New York Times. Citing current and former commanders of the Kosovo Liberation Army as well as Albanian government officials, the Times reports that KLA leader Hashem Thaci and two of his lieutenants allegedly directed a purge in which as many as six rival commanders were shot dead in a bitter struggle for control of the organization. Thaci has denied the allegations. Of course, such skulduggery might be par for the course in guerrilla movements, but the KLA has been implicitly anointed as Washington...
...Stalin's urgency to kill Trotsky revolves around a secret that Stalin fears Trotsky is near to discovering. The reader knows, of course, that the assassin's ice ax will end up, on schedule, embedded in Trotsky's skull. The suspense is in waiting to learn Stalin's unpardonable sin--which turns out to be, historically, an interesting sin indeed...
After 1945, Hitler's Germans replaced complicity with denial ("We didn't know!"). Stalin, while in power, achieved mass complicity by betrayal. People knew exactly what was going on, and informed on others to save themselves. The poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in the Gulag, said bitterly, "Stalin doesn't have to cut heads off. They fly off by themselves, like dandelions." Lourie has ingeniously captured the moment when the Soviet air was filled with dandelions...