Word: lenin
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...last week, government officials struck out at yet another target: foreign newsmen. The 60 Moscow-based Western correspondents were cautioned about their reporting of Soviet dissent and the raging controversy over Solzhenitsyn's new book, The Gulag Archipelago, an exhaustive study of the Soviet system of terror under Lenin and Stalin. In an article in the Literary Gazette, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Vsevolod Sofinsky warned that foreign correspondents would "create difficulties for themselves" by seeking what Sofinsky called "nonexistent facts and information" about dissenters like Solzhenitsyn. Similar admonitions in the past have often led to police harassment and expulsion...
...quoted in order to incite my uninformed countrymen against me: 'Solzhenitsyn equates the Soviet people with the Nazi murderers.' That was a neat bit of word juggling. Yes, I did equate Nazi murderers with the murderers from the Cheka, the G.P.U. and the N.K.V.D. [secret police under Lenin and Stalin]. But Literary Gazette substitutes 'the Soviet people' for the police, so our own executioners can hide more easily in the crowd...
...peasant revolution (Jose Clemente Orozco died in 1949, Diego Rivera in 1957), Siqueiros was as noted for his political acts as for his artistic achievements. In the '60s he spent four years in jail for stirring up student demonstrations, and in 1967 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union. Siqueiros' crude, bold, bright murals of historical and revolutionary scenes were sometimes caricature, sometimes fantasy, but they were always intended to instruct. His last major work (1971), in the garden of Mexico City's Hotel de Mexico, is a 48,000-sq.-ft. mural...
Striking at Lenin. The power and substance of Solzhenitsyn's condemnation seemed likely to bring down the Kremlin's wrath on the already beleaguered author (see BOOKS). In contrast to his novels One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Cancer Ward and The First Circle, which dealt only with Stalin's terror, Gulag strikes out at the officially idolized figure of Lenin. Solzhenitsyn rejects the Kremlin's thesis that Stalin alone was responsible for the "excesses" of his time. Instead, Solzhenitsyn devastatingly demonstrates that the imprisonment of millions under Stalin was made possible...
Medvedev knows his way around the Soviet bureaucracy, and it is in that sort of expertise that his book is most interesting. He understands how campaigns of public opinion are mounted, as when Pravda presented an outpouring of orchestrated "mail" against awarding Solzhenitsyn the Lenin Prize. There is a cold fascination in learning that Glavlit-the machinery of hacks that controls censorship-could overrule even First Secretary Khrushchev about what should be published. More recently, Novelist Mikhail Sholokhov (Quiet Flows the Don) had to delete a chapter from a new novel called They Fought for the Motherland at the censors...