Word: brezhnevs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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STARS IN THE MORNING SKY, Contemporary Theater, Moscow. Galina Volchek directs a superbly acted indictment of the Brezhnev years, a play depicting how drunks, prostitutes and madmen were swept off the streets of Moscow and into exile as Soviet authorities polished up the capital on the eve of the 1980 Olympic Games...
Party lines, like glaciers, do move. But for Soviet artists, glasnost seems more like a whirlpool of possibilities, most of them still anxiously hypothetical. The artists have had to learn not to be optimists. Fifteen years ago, Leonid Brezhnev's officials sent plainclothes militia and bulldozers to break up and bury an outdoor show of unofficial art in Sokolniki, a park on the outskirts of Moscow. This goons' picnic would not be repeated today. The socialist realist line, imposed by Stalin after 1929 and kept to the end of Brezhnev's reign, held that a work of art should fulfill...
Rewriting history has long been a tradition among Soviet leaders. Stalin revised a history of the Communist Party to puff up his role in the Bolshevik Revolution. Nikita Khrushchev began the deflation of Stalin; Leonid Brezhnev converted Khrushchev into a nonperson; Gorbachev in turn has depreciated Brezhnev, causing his name to be removed from factories, cities and streets. As the joke goes, the Soviet Union is the only country in the world with an unpredictable past...
During the Brezhnev era, rock music was carefully controlled through the State Concert Agency, a government bureaucracy that reserved the right to determine which bands could legally perform in public places. Only bands that were officially registered by the agency could receive money for their shows, a ploy that allowed bureaucrats to weed out undesirable groups by choking off their income...
...punk is in the presentation, which can shock Soviet conformists. Once, Sukachev demolished an enormous poster of Brezhnev onstage, then threw the pieces into the audience. During a number about drug addiction, he often pantomimes a heroine injection. His shaved-sided flop-mop elicits frequent comment on Moscow's streets. "People think I'm a fascist," he says. "I can't think how many times I've been called that...