Word: brezhnevs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When I saw Ruml again, two years later, the "Brezhnev winter" had descended on Prague. Ruml, along with 3,000 other journalists, had lost his job and been expelled from the Communist Party. His new career: working as a crane operator with a road gang. Ruml's wife Jirina Hrabkova had been removed as the moderator of a popular radio program, and was selling sausages at the Prague Zoo. Worst of all, their two sons Jan, 17, and Jakob, 15, were hounded out of high school and denied a university education...
...celebrate triumph after triumph, from the success of the Revolution to victory in World War II to the launch of Sputnik. They gloss over Stalin's purges, the starvation of millions during the collectivization of farms, military blunders that nearly lost the war to Hitler and corruption in the Brezhnev era. Meanwhile, an elementary primer claims, "The leadership of the party of Communists is working well and is building a new, happy life...
Stalin despised it as "decadent bourgeois formalism" and had it locked away. Khrushchev called it excrement and branded its creators "pederasts." Brezhnev ordered bulldozers to smash it into the ground at an outdoor exhibit. Such has been the fate of Russia's modernist art at the hands of dictators bent on enforcing their philistine tastes with the whole armamentarium of the totalitarian state. Even Mikhail Gorbachev has found that the tradition of putting down avant-garde art dies hard among cultural bureaucrats. As a result, the visual arts have been far slower than literature and music to benefit from glasnost...
...words were inflammatory, but the audience took them in stride. Referring to the discredited era of Leonid Brezhnev, who died in 1982, Vladimir I. Melnikov, an obscure official from the Russian republic, declared from the podium at the 19th All-Union Communist Party Conference, "People who in previous times actively conducted the policy of stagnation cannot now be on, or work in, central party or Soviet organs in the period of restructuring...
...large, delegates refrained from discussing Soviet foreign policy. The exception was the eight-year war in Afghanistan, which was criticized as a misguided Brezhnev-era adventure by two speakers, Editor Grigori Baklanov and Economist Yevgeni Primakov. But Gorbachev was applauded when he defended the performance of Soviet troops in Afghanistan. The commander of the Soviet forces there, Lieut. General Boris Gromov, told the conference that "we have performed our duty with honor...