Word: grouped
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Many of the Russian writers are openly sympathetic to the ugliest manifestation of Soviet neoconservatism. Founded in 1979 as a cultural and historical group attached to the Ministry of Aviation Industry, Pamyat (memory) has grown into a violence-tinged social movement that blends ardent nationalism with virulent anti-Semitism. To Pamyat's conspiracy theorists, an evil alliance of Zionists and Freemasons is responsible for most of the world's woes; Jews who were at the heart of the Bolshevik Revolution are blamed for the failures of Communism...
...important to remember that the Great Russian Revolution was not great, and it was not Russian," says Dmitri Vasiliev, the group's principal theoretician. "It was organized by Jews." Vasiliev is mildly contemptuous of Gorbachev ("He has no clear thoughts and no perseverance") and calls Lenin a "merciless Bolshevik." At the movement's noisy rallies, hecklers are often attacked by Pamyat toughs who are the Soviet version of skinheads. Soviet Jews are concerned that Pamyat's modest membership of several thousand is an inadequate index of its power. Says Boris Kelman, a Leningrad refusenik: "Pamyat is not only protected...
...changed dramatically for Marju Lauristin, 48, a journalism professor who had watched the show at home in the university city of Tartu. Inviting other activists to her apartment, she helped write the founding declaration of the Estonian Popular Front. Less than three weeks later, local party officials gave the group guarded approval to organize...
...least two institutions are dedicated to examining the bitter truth about the past. A Politburo commission formed by Gorbachev has rehabilitated such figures as Nikolai Bukharin, shot after a frame-up show trial in 1938. A rapidly growing group called Memorial aims to build a monument to Stalin's victims and establish an archive and research center to document his crimes...
Memorial's members include such prominent intellectuals as poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, historian Medvedev and Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov, who serves as the group's honorary chairman. But its most important role is to provide an outlet for the grief and pain that victims of Stalin and their relatives have long had to keep to themselves. A steady stream of visitors from all over the Soviet Union seek out Memorial's cramped Moscow office. Many are elderly women who wait for as long as an hour and a half -- as if "they were lining up to buy sausage," says a Memorial...