Word: pravda
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...generation of Russians taught by Pravda that Stalin was the greatest agriculturalist, philologist, geneticist, political scientist and military commander was told last week, just as categorically: "No matter how experienced leaders are, no matter what knowledge and talents they possess, they cannot succeed in replacing the whole collective. The most important principle is that decisions should be based on the experience of many, should be the fruit of collective creation...
Having so crisply and accurately described Stalin's reign, Pravda added that of course it didn't mean Stalin: "The circumstances of wartime made possible certain peculiarities in the methods of leadership which in certain degree were justified." But, it continued, "leaders cannot take a critical statement aimed at them as a personal offense...
...helped him transform the dictatorship of the proletariat into the dictatorship of the secretariat. One by one, the Old Bolshevik revolutionaries went down before Stalin's wrath: Trotsky the warlord, Zinoviev, chief of the Communist International, Bukharin, Lenin's "closest disciple" and longtime editor of Pravda, Kamenev, ambassador to London and Rome, Tomsky, head of trade unions, Rykov, head of government. Their power went to Stalin, their jobs to his faithful...
...tired, ailing and scarred by writing to please his Soviet masters, Sergei Prokofiev, Russia's finest modern composer, sat down to write his Seventh Symphony. His aim, he told Pravda, was to "create in music a picture of bright youth." In Philadelphia last week, five weeks after his death, Prokofiev's "Youth Symphony" got its U.S. premiere. The last work of the master turned out to be as pretty and inconsequential as a Hollywood film score...
Moscow applauded the Seventh Symphony at the world premiere last fall, and Pravda itself stamped it doctrinally O.K. Philadelphia's dignified matinee audience, which had half expected to be buffeted and assaulted by modernist clangor, had a pleasant enough half hour, called Conductor Ormandy back for four bows. Sergei Prokofiev had done what he had been told to do: his symphony could be understood by almost anybody on a single hearing. A Philadelphia matron summed up his last work in a sentence. "It sounds," she sighed happily, "just like Gilbert & Sullivan." For Sergei Prokofiev, the composer who once seemed...