Word: pravda
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...accepted the award of the Nobel Prize as a literary distinction. I rejoiced . . . But I was wrong." White-haired Russian Poet-Novelist Boris Pasternak wrote these abject words in Pravda last week, and the Soviet news agency Tass triumphantly fired them round the world as Pasternak's "confession" that the Swedish prize committee's award to him last month had been "political...
...contemporary Russia. He turned down the Nobel Prize; he addressed an eloquent personal plea to Nikita Khrushchev ("To leave my country would be death") against the exile that the party literary hacks led by David Zaslavsky were insistently demanding. And when all this was not enough, he wrote to Pravda...
What had gone wrong? Komsomolskaya Pravda blamed it on "a passion for foreign clothes, foreign dances and foreign names," which led to the further deviation of listening to rock 'n' roll and the Voice of America. From such evil habits it was only a step further to hard drinking and absenteeism. Komsomolskaya Pravda quoted with horror a passage from Kostiuk's diary: "I don't understand how one can find any satisfaction in work. Study is also useless." In retrospect, the newspaper blamed the plant collective for failing to apply "corrective measures" in time...
Tried in Moscow city court, the four were sentenced to prison terms-but not enough to suit Komsomolskaya Pravda, which complained especially because Shashkin, who did the actual shooting, got only 25 years. Why not death? demanded the paper. Under Soviet law, either the defense or the prosecution can appeal. Last week, on the prosecutor's appeal, the Supreme Court of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic ordered death by firing squad for Stilyaga Shashkin...
...highest honor in the literary world came as a dastardly capitalist insult, and they promptly went into one of their vitriolic temper tantrums. The Moscow Literary Gazette sputtered that the award was made "for an artistically squalid, malicious work replete with hatred of socialism," written by a traitor, and Pravda said that this "malevolent Philistine" would regret the prize if there were "a spark of Soviet dignity left in him." Prizewinner Pasternak, a gentle genius of craggily handsome countenance and unflinching integrity, sent the Nobel committee a six-word cable in English: "Immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed...