Word: gulager
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After 1945, Hitler's Germans replaced complicity with denial ("We didn't know!"). Stalin, while in power, achieved mass complicity by betrayal. People knew exactly what was going on, and informed on others to save themselves. The poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in the Gulag, said bitterly, "Stalin doesn't have to cut heads off. They fly off by themselves, like dandelions." Lourie has ingeniously captured the moment when the Soviet air was filled with dandelions...
...probably a safe bet that Natan Sharansky, former Soviet dissident and leader of the Russian immigrants in Israel, voted for Netanyahu, the man he credits with helping free him from the Soviet gulag. But he may have cost his buddy the race. The other Soviet Jews, 700,000 of whom have arrived in Israel in the past decade and who now represent 14% of the nation's electorate, swung victory to Barak. Veteran Israelis tend to stick rigidly in either the Labor or Likud camp, but "the Russians," as they are called, can go either way. This time just over...
...wheat and thus increase the number of annual harvests. Lysenko believed all living organisms passed on to succeeding generations characteristics acquired in their lifetime. This untested theory was at odds with what Lysenko scathingly called "alien bourgeois" genetics, but Soviet scientists who dared disagree risked being sent to the gulag. The cost was high. Even after Lysenko's final fall at the end of the Khrushchev era, Soviet agriculture continued to suffer. Worse still, Soviet scientists missed out on the genetics revolution. To this day, Russian biology lags behind that of the West, thanks to Comrade Lysenko...
There is, for example, a whole generation of Soviet officials who put perfectly sane dissidents into psychiatric prisons and presided over that hell called the gulag. Those officials are not just running around the world. Some of them are still running Russia...
...professor Martha Minow opens her book Between Vengeance and Forgiveness by listing the reasons why it had to be written and why it should be read: "The Holocaust and Final Solution, the Rape of Nanking, the...killings of Cambodians, the genocide of Armenians...the killings of the Hutus, the Gulag, the tortures of 'leftists' in Chile, the students in Argentina, the victims of apartheid." She makes a grim list of the genocides, violence, mass tortures and collective horror, nothing how our century is characterized by these and other atrocities and how it may be remembered more for its mass graves...