Word: stalinization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Most Soviet citizens do not share Andropov's high regard for the KGB. They view it with deep distaste and fear, in part because memories are still vivid of the murderous role played by the secret police in Stalin's dreadful purges. Although his successors halted mass terror and greatly reduced the KGB's autonomy, the agency continues to keep stern watch over every aspect of Soviet citizens' lives...
...Dzerzhinsky Square; in tsarist times it housed the All-Russian Insurance Co. Behind the headquarters is the most celebrated KGB structure, Lubyanka Prison, through which tens of thousands of Soviet citizens have passed on their way to concentration camps or execution. These probably included three of Stalin's own secret police chiefs-Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrenti Beria-who were shot following their fall from power. The KGB has administrative offices in every major center, and KGB officers occupy key posts in the Soviet armed forces and the regular police, as well as in factories, government offices, universities...
...professional. His most notable previous post: Soviet Ambassador in Budapest, where he helped put down the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Among Andropov's most important functions is to keep the KGB under firm party control so that the secret police can never again wield the power it possessed under Stalin, when it arrested, tortured and killed thousands of loyal party officials...
...joke that Muscovites tell about their economic system involves Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, who are riding a special train. When the engine breaks down, Stalin has the crew shot. Nothing happens. After a while, Khrushchev rehabilitates the engineers. Still no movement. Finally, Brezhnev pulls down the shades and sighs, "Well, let's pretend we are moving...
This deep hostility to modernism, a permanent legacy of Stalin, seems especially ironic to Western eyes because it was in Russia, between 1910 and 1925, that one of the great experiments of modern art was carried out. The leaders of the avantgarde, among them Kasimir Malevich, Naum Gabo, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, wanted to serve the new power of the left by combining revolutionary art with revolutionary politics. Russian constructivism was, in fact, the only heroic modernist style that drew its strength from the revolutionary impetus. Yet its sin was in being abstract, and for that...