Word: commissars
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Life was full of grotesque jokes straight out of Gogol. The author tells of the commissar who had to put a stop to patriotic letters denouncing offenders against the regime because his office could not handle the flow. She notes Stalin's surprise phone call to Boris Pasternak to ask the author of the yet unwritten Dr. Zhivago just how good a poet Mandelstam was. Pasternak cautiously digressed and then suggested that he and Stalin meet for a chat. "About what?" asked the voice from the Kremlin. "About life and death," replied Pasternak. Stalin hung...
...point, Stalin called in Soviet Defense Commissar Kliment Voroshilov for a dressing down. Voroshilov angrily retorted: "You have yourself to blame for all this! You're the one that had our best generals killed!" With that, Khrushchev recalls, the Defense Commissar "picked up a platter with a boiled suckling pig on it and smashed it on the table." The 1939-40 "Winter War" cost about 1,000,000 Soviet lives, says Khrushchev, and ended in a "moral defeat" for Stalin, though the Finns agreed to pull back about seven miles...
...probably had no involvement in some of the more spectacular phonies foisted on the West. The so-called "memoir" by the late Maxim Litvinov, Stalin's Foreign Commissar, was actually produced by a Soviet defector in Paris, while The Penkovsky Papers, purportedly the diaries of a spy in the upper echelon of the Soviet intelligence system who was caught and shot, were allegedly partly concocted...
Indispensable Tradition. The Swedish Academy cited Solzhenitsyn for "the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature." In a country where church, judiciary and other institutions have often proved unable to restrain the power of either czar or commissar, the writer has emerged as the last authoritative voice of conscience. Tolstoy protected peasants against religious persecution, and Pushkin nurtured democratic ideals that inspired the 1825 Decembrist uprising. Gorky sought to restrain the more brutal urges of the Bolsheviks, and Pasternak remained a symbol of moral values. Solzhenitsyn is aware of the power-and perils...
...earlier beatings, sealed off city hall from the demonstrators and patrolled the march. The mood was tense, not angry. Mayor John Lindsay was burned in effigy and denounced by many signs: IMPEACH THE RED MAYOR and, over a mock coffin, HERE LIES THE CITY OF NEW YORK BURIED BY COMMISSAR LINDSAY...