Word: gulags
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...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...
...service of religious conviction runs in his family. His father Pyotr was a U.S.-trained preacher who went back to the Soviet Union in 1922 as a missionary. He was arrested three times for his religious activities and died in 1943 somewhere in Stalin's vast Gulag system. Georgi pursued a career in industrial research in Kiev until he dedicated himself full time to religious work...
From distant points in the vast Gulag archipelago, five bone-weary men were rounded up and taken to Moscow. At 4 a.m. on Friday of last week, they were abruptly awakened, handed suits in exchange for prison garb, curtly informed that they were being stripped of their Soviet citizenship, and rushed to Sheremetyevo Airport. There they boarded Aeroflot Flight 315 for New York City. At Kennedy Airport in the foggy afternoon, the ex-prisoners of conscience-Dissidents Alexander Ginzburg, Georgi Vins, Mark Dymshits, Eduard Kuznetsov and Valentyn Moroz-were released into American hands, while two convicted Soviet spies were hustled...
...teaching in the Soviet Union, Maloumian was accused of spying for the French secret service. He was first condemned to death, but was later convicted of treason, despite his foreign nationality, and sentenced to 25 years at hard labor. In early 1956, when Soviet authorities were cutting down the Gulag population as part of the destalinization drive, Maloumian was informed by the warden of Taishet, a prison in eastern Siberia, that his arrest had been a mistake and that he was to be declared "rehabilitated" and freed. Though he returned to France, where he became an airline ticket salesman, Maloumian...
...concept of political dissent as a symptom of mental illness is hard to imagine except as an obscenity. Bukovsky is properly outraged, both as victim and witness. But he is also bitterly amusing. For unlike most children of the Gulag, the au thor manages to combine the traditions of Dostoyevsky's brooding victims with Gogol's antic farceurs. The more benign psychiatrists, he notes, diagnosed opposition as a mild form of paranoia that did not require special treatment. The hardliners called it "creeping schizophrenia" and prescribed agonizing sulfur injections...