Word: gulags
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...latest novel, The Loser, Konrád takes the ultimate journey of the modern European, piling up horror upon horror on the way: the Holocaust, the Gulag, the carnage of World War II, the postwar purges in Eastern Europe, the failed 1956 Hungarian uprising. The literature documenting the inhumanity of the age is vast. Yet Konrád's masterly new novel offers fresh insight into the cruel stratagems of totalitarian rule...
Such a vast change of politicians and administrators has not occurred in the Soviet Union since the great purges of the late 1930s, when thousands of powerful bureaucrats were shot or dispatched to the gulag on Stalin's orders. This time, however, the scourge is not a paranoid and murderous dictator. It is old age. Most top officials in the country's ruling bodies are the same age as the majority of Politburo members: in their 60s and 70s. Roy Medvedev, the independent-minded Marxist historian living in Moscow, believes that younger men will move into top positions around...
...warming of the international climate touched off a thaw inside the U.S.S.R. Partly because he had attended his first summit meeting with Western leaders the year before in Geneva, Khrushchev felt able to launch his destalinization campaign and begin releasing prisoners from the Gulag Archipelago in 1956. This time American diplomacy had helped to improve conditions within the Soviet Union. But in the absence of clear, consistent ideas about how the Soviet system really works, American efforts to make that system more compatible with U.S. interests and values have been doomed to repeat old errors and commit new ones...
...other offered a more radical departure from the standard Socialist Realist fare. His nonconformity came naturally. Aksyonov had been born an alien in the Soviet world. He was the child of Stalin's victims: his father Pavel, the former Communist mayor of Kazan, served 18 years in the Gulag, and his mother Eugenia Ginzburg wrote two books about her own 18-year ordeal...
...these innocents hurtle into the 20th century with ingenuous vigor. Feasting on suckling pig in Madrid's toniest restaurant or visiting the Valley of the Fallen, Spain's grandiose monument to its Civil War dead, the compañeros loudly dispute the merits of their beliefs: the Gulag vs. the Inquisition; Stalin vs. Judas; Brezhnev vs. Franco. The priest veers toward an ecumenical humanism; the Marxist sighs for a materialistic Utopia. They agree only about the culture that confronts them. Says Quixote: "It's an absurd world or we wouldn't be here together...