Word: kosterin
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Dates: during 1968-1968
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Unquiet Sleep. Thus last week did Russia bestow final rites on Aleksei Kosterin, a writer who, only a month before he died, had resigned from the Communist Party rather than face what he considered illegal expulsion for his views. Kosterin had protested a variety of Soviet repressions, including the recent trials of dissidents and the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Though that alone might have accounted for the brusqueness of his funeral, Soviet authorities were actually far more concerned with the living than with the dead in the crematorium. For Kosterin's eulogist was his old friend, Major General Pyotr Grigorenko...
Dark Days. Kosterin had fought against more than one machine in his 72 years. He became a Bolshevik a year before the Russian Revolution in 1917 and was a party member in good standing until arrested in Stalin's widespread purges of the mid-1930s. Not long after he was released from a labor camp, after Stalin's death in 1953, his daughter Nina gained posthumous fame in the Soviet Union as Russia's Anne Frank. At the age of 20, she had been executed by the Nazis for her part in a partisan raid...
...intellectuals and artists attending Kosterin's funeral, he was the very symbol of uncompromising Leninism that was crushed mercilessly in Stalin's era-and is now imperiled again. Some brought wreaths bearing ribbons that read, "For his fight against Stalinism" and "From his comrades and friends in the prisons and camps." Grigorenko, an engineer whose libertarian views cost him his army rank in 1964, urged the mourners to work for "the persistent development of genuine Leninist democracy," and scathingly dismissed the current "totalitarianism that hides behind the mask of so-called Soviet democracy" as its antithesis...
...Thinking Being. Kosterin's recent dismissal from the Soviet Writers Union, said Grigorenko, placed him in the admirable company of Boris Pasternak. Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn was almost kicked out, he added, "although it is Solzhenitsyn who confers honor on the Union of Writers by being its member, while the union adds nothing to Solzhenitsyn." Then, returning to the hard life of his friend, he paid final tribute to a valiant spirit and, in the process, movingly described the source of intellectual discontent in today's Russia. "A person, in Kosterin's idea, is a thinking being. Therefore...
Died. Aleksei Kosterin, 72, Soviet writer and critic of the Communist regime; in Moscow (see THE WORLD...