RUSSIA: Drip, Drip, Drip

When Joseph Stalin purged his foes within the Soviet hierarchy, he put them away with historic callousness: most of them were summarily shot. This precedent is still honored on occasion in satellite nations such as Rumania, which, in the course of its current purge of "revisionists," recently executed eight citizens of Hungarian ancestry accused of "separatist plotting." But in Russia itself, Nikita Khrushchev, with a little more refinement, generally spares the lives of the men he purges, subjects them instead to a Muscovite version of the Chinese water torture.

The case of Nikolai Bulganin: Feb. 8, 1955—Named Premier of...

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