Word: gulag
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...vulnerability when they speak of the ideological legitimization of genocidal action. Every source of prestige (including Darwin), from religion to science to social science, has been used to legitimize genocide, powerseeking, and exploitation. Applying their own standards to themselves, one would find them ideological participants in the Soviet Gulag, the Cambodian holocaust, and China's system of "re-education...
When one looks into the eyes of those who have lived through Dachau and Auschwitz, the Gulag and the Cambodian holocaust, Vietnam in the 1960's and Vietnam in the late 1970's, the terror in Kampala and the tanks in Prague, they bear witness to the same human reality. The barbed wire in South Africa, Brazil Russia and Chile, Berlin and China is the shadow of the barbed wire that is stretched through our minds. The seed of that darkness is everywhere, and our hope lies in the fragile unfolding of our knowledge of the common roots of human...
...Symphony, which established Shostakovich's reputation in the Soviet Union, was meant to describe Stalin's Great Terror of 1936-37. In the post-Stalin era, his Thirteenth Symphony was intended as a protest against antiSemitism, and his Fourteenth was an evocation of the horrors of the Gulag...
...Alexander Glazunov constitutes one of the most affecting portraits of a composer in the literature of music. Shostakovich muses over the fates of his close friends, the director Vsevolod Meyerhold, the Red Army Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and others more obscure: composers, an organist, a musicologist. All died in the Gulag. "When I started going over the life stories of my friends and acquaintances," he told Volkov, "all I saw was corpses, mountains of corpses...
...repression had begun. In Stalin's slow and terrible eye, such art was decadent and, because of its internationalism, bourgeois-formalist. The Gulag swallowed some artists, like Boris Kushner. Others, such as Larionov, Goncharova, Gabo and Ivan Puni, went into exile. Those who stayed, like Rodchenko or the architect Konstantin Melnikov, survived as ghosts, forgotten men in a culture of vindictive Stalinist toadies. Like Cronus, the Revolution devoured its children. As a wholesale trashing of a civilization, only Hitler's demolition of the German modernists compares with it. Inside the Soviet Union, the works themselves lay buried, invisible...