![]() ![]() ![]() Manifestations of political opposition were met with arrest. Harder and softer phases of the system alternated, although without ever returning to the harshest forms of political terror as practiced under Stalin. Totalitarian rule under Stalin would give way, after the dictator’s death in 1953, to milder forms of Soviet Communist rule under Stalin’s successors, Nikita Khrushchev and, from 1964, Leonid Brezhnev. Kremlin propaganda championed the Soviet system’s guarantee of economic and social rights, which it portrayed as a hallmark of a socialist society. Freedom of religion was circumscribed and official atheism enforced. ![]() Genuine civil and political rights were strictly limited, as the Gulag camps were filled with political prisoners. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) ruled the country in the name of the state ideology of Marxism-Leninism. It was also a time of severe economic hardship following the destruction and dislocation caused by the Second World War. In 1948, the year the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed, the USSR was in the grip of high Stalinism, whose trademarks were harsh political repression and terror. Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, Stanford University ![]()
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