Word: gulag
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PYOTR BELOV, Tverskoi Boulevard 11, Moscow. Twenty-two allegorical works about Stalin's reign of terror, by the theater artist Pyotr Belov (1929-88). Among the most damning: one portraying antlike columns of Gulag prisoners emerging from a pack of Belomor cigarettes -- a reference to the forced labor that built the Belomor canal -- and another showing Stalin up to his boots in a sea of dandelions imprinted with the faces of his victims...
...exposed by the spotlight. "Three hundred forty-nine days! Three hundred forty-nine days!" she screams. "Bite on your hat, anything to keep from sobbing!" Few in the audience at Moscow's Sovremennik Theater stifle the emotion inspired by such searing scenes from Eugenia Ginzburg's memoirs of the Gulag, Journey into the Whirlwind. An innocent victim of the Stalinist purges, the heroine endures humiliating interrogations, strip searches and endless nights during which she covers her ears to block out the cries of the tortured. In a final, chilling tableau, she even welcomes assignment to the labor camps...
...central players in what evolves from a surface entertainment into a deceptively rich and complex novel about coming of age (if not about the age itself). Julian's story brims with figures and rituals familiar to British fiction: barmy relatives, eccentric aristocrats, a public school -- the "English Gulag" -- where the headmaster enjoys hitting boys with sticks. As a teenager, Julian spends a summer in Brittany, where French is taught by Mme. de Normandin and sex by her daughter Barbara. Later, while trying to avoid work in the army, he learns another of life's essential lessons: "Not-really-trying...
...airwaves. But the millions of Soviets who watch Molchanov's show find it spellbinding for other reasons. They tune in for a glimpse of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost: a prominent Soviet writer denouncing the "monstrous slavery" of Stalinism, scenes of rusting railway cars in an abandoned stretch of the Gulag, even rare film footage of Czar Nicholas II and the royal family...
...last June Martin published a piece that displeased one very important reader: Richard Rison, the newly appointed warden at Lompoc. Headlined THE GULAG MENTALITY, Martin's article charged that Rison had increased tension at the prison by limiting access to the recreation yard and replacing the inmates' individually decorated and highly prized chairs with plain gray folding chairs. "He's tryin' to start a riot," complained an unidentified convict in Martin's story. "We might just as well give him one and get it over with...