Finally, the postwar Communist regimes were not simply the heirs to anti-Fascist resisters, as their Stalinist leaders liked to claim.

Thousands of Germans died in the immediate post-war years and an estimated 75,000 were imprisoned by East Germany's former Stalinist leaders for political reasons, he said.

Walter Ulbricht, East Germany's rigidly Stalinist leader, was constantly scheming, however.

In Eastern Europe, Stalinist leaders found themselves under heavy pressure to reform or step aside for more supple successors.

Such pressure was especially welcome because Russia is the only nation with real influence over Aleksandr Lukashenko, the Stalinist leader of Belarus.

He said today that the Government of Kim Il Sung, the North's Stalinist leader, "is much more isolated this year than it was last year."

Hoxha regarded Soviet pressure as acting in the service of ulterior, revisionist aims in an effort to unseat or otherwise undermine "Stalinist" leaders.

They took power after the old Stalinist leader, Todor Zhivkov, was ousted in 1989, but did little in the way of genuine reform.

In this "invaluable historical, political and psychological document," Poland's Stalinist leaders of the 1940's and 50's are subjected to "well-prepared, systematic interrogations" by a journalist.

Will the Stalinist leaders of Czechoslovakia be able to go on resisting the tide of freedom?