Word: lenin
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These posters by Soviet artists are designed to rally Mikhail Gorbachev's countrymen around his crusade. One notes the year Gorbachev came to power and began wiping away the grime of history that has dimmed Lenin's revolution. The other presents the current leader as maestro, winning a rousing "Bravo!" as he puts his own gloss on a score written by V.I. Lenin...
...dilettante. "Unofficial" artists are at the bottom of the official pole whose summit is the Academy of Arts, that august body of 77 academicians and 99 alternate members. Among them are the state propagandists, whose mission it is to turn out the unending stream of statues of Lenin (with benign and resolute features that grow more Asiatic the further east they go) for public places from Minsk to Irkutsk. Many an unofficial artist finds himself in the predicament of Nikolai Filatov, whose large canvases -- a fervent compost of '50s-style abstract expressionism and broken-up cubofuturist planes -- are beginning...
...state-controlled fashion industry had made it impossible for them to put together well-coordinated wardrobes. "When it comes to fashion in Moscow," she says, "a sense of humor is especially important." Her fellow designer, Katya Fillipova, 29, pokes fun at Soviet icons; her creations include a portrait of Lenin fastened to a rhinestone cross and sewn onto the jacket of a border guard...
...important to remember that the Great Russian Revolution was not great, and it was not Russian," says Dmitri Vasiliev, the group's principal theoretician. "It was organized by Jews." Vasiliev is mildly contemptuous of Gorbachev ("He has no clear thoughts and no perseverance") and calls Lenin a "merciless Bolshevik." At the movement's noisy rallies, hecklers are often attacked by Pamyat toughs who are the Soviet version of skinheads. Soviet Jews are concerned that Pamyat's modest membership of several thousand is an inadequate index of its power. Says Boris Kelman, a Leningrad refusenik: "Pamyat is not only protected...
More important, a few Soviet intellectuals have begun arguing that a re- examination of the country's bloody past should not stop with Stalin but should go on to -- whisper it -- Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin himself, and to some of his principles, such as the centralization of all power in the Communist Party. Gorbachev often represents his policies as a return to the pure tenets of Lenin that Stalin perverted. But a few voices are suggesting, at least by implication, that the history debate is ultimately about the legitimacy of the Soviet state, a state with no validation other than...