Word: lenin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...effective. To this day, one can't look at the Constructivist designs for agitprop events -- the red panels of Natan Altman's bold transformation of the huge Palace Square in Leningrad for the first birthday of the October Revolution, or the steel-truss tribune designed by Lissitzky to carry Lenin forward like a high diver over the heads of a crowd -- without a feeling of exhilaration: this, not the bureaucratic and murderous reality of institutional Marxism, is what it was meant to be like, that now closed chapter in Russian history...
...class basis of truth; narodnost, or accessibility to the people; and partinost, or Party spirit. The artists now appear in the treble guise of visionaries, heroes and victims. Most art lovers probably believe, on this point, that Stalin betrayed the revolution and are unwilling to think of Lenin as the savage autocrat he was; they are apt to suppose, moreover, that Lenin (who had a stony immunity to visual art) personally evoked this creative surge, which is another myth...
...roots of the great Russian efflorescence go much further back than either Lenin or the 1917 Revolution. They lie in the liberal, high-bourgeois culture of Moscow and St. Petersburg, a culture that pullulated with avant- garde splinter groups and wild chiliastic claims, exquisitely attuned not only to Russian traditions of religious mysticism but also to Cubism, Futurism, Symbolism and other currents in Paris, Rome, Vienna. To imagine that the work of spiritually obsessed artists like Kandinsky or Malevich had any filial relationship to Marxism is to miss its meaning. Malevich, an egomaniacal genius who called himself "the president...
...WERE startling: an obese, bespectacled man obeying police orders to put on his shirt. Could this dumpy, bewildered fellow, last seen publicly in 1979, really be Shining Path's shining light? Here was the mysterious man who billed himself as the "Fourth Sword" of communism -- the successor to Marx, Lenin and Mao. Under the guerrilla alias "Presidente Gonzalo," Guzman fashioned himself into the demigod of a cultlike political movement. As far as his supporters were concerned, Guzman's mythic aura of brilliance, charisma and invincibility shielded him from comparisons with other mortals. Latin Americans may regard Che Guevara...
...Soviet denials of Lenin's complicity had long been discredited in the West, but a statement from Alexei Akimov, who in 1918 had served in the Kremlin as a guard to Lenin, completed the case against the Bolshevik leaders. "When the Ural Regional Party Committee decided to shoot Nicholas' family, the Central Executive Committee wrote a telegram confirming this decision...