Word: brezhnevs
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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...
...seemed quite normal for John, but it was evidence for me that people no longer lived here the way they used to. Stalin began the practice of giving privileges to the leadership: special foods, dachas fenced off from those belonging to ordinary mortals, apartments in the best-built houses. Brezhnev expanded these privileges. How many hunting and fishing "lodges" were built and furnished with Finnish furniture and rugs so thick you could tumble into them up to your waist! This inequality in a society declaring equality caused great indignation...
Here was a new generation of 30- and 40-year-olds who went unnoticed in the capital: young Gorbachevs from the provinces who had survived the Brezhnev years with some of their ideals intact. They certainly bridled at being cast as backwater party bureaucrats...