Word: proletariat
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Author Pikul's suggestion that the empress slept with Rasputin, for which there is no basis in fact, seems designed merely to appeal to the prurient interests of the proletariat. So do passages alluding to Rasputin's vast sexual appetite and his zest for orgies-which have been amply documented by historians. But the book seemingly has other and more unsavory functions. One is to encourage the xenophobia that still has a strong hold on the many Russian chauvinists in the elite, who believe that alien forces have caused their homeland's troubles down through the ages...
...economically foundering country would bother with artists or art schools. The U.S.S.R. did so after the Revolution, thanks to two circumstances that hold true in no modern capitalist state. Print was thinly spread among the masses, radio almost unheard of and there was no television. Moreover, most of the proletariat was not only illiterate, but steeped in the tradition of the icon. So ideological control of static visual images was necessary to the party. One might even say that the Russian avant-garde was the last group of artists to work in a society where painting and, to a lesser...
Lenin had already conceived of a mass culture, separate and distinct from the high culture of the salons and the Bolshoi; and in 1917 the Central Committee announced that "in art, the proletariat is drawn to ... strong, bright and clear forms, to what is complete and has definite meaning." This was probably meant to encourage agitprop poster design. The artists, however, took it as a stamp of approval for cubo-futurism, suprematism, constructivism and the other isms that the ferment of Western art had helped set off. In their enthusiasm to create a new culture that would be a synthesis...
...Convalescent, who stands opening a boiled egg in a kind of reverential silence, like a secular descendant of Georges de la Tour's saints, is not a representative of the class war; the efforts of some historians to see Chardin's servants as emblems of an oppressed proletariat on the eve of the French Revolution are simply beside the point. A sense of social precariousness is the last thing one could expect to meet in a Chardin; indeed, one can hardly imagine him working without the conviction that his way of life was immutable-that there would always...
...repression. The activists belong to a group that publishes a clandestine journal called Inquiry. Protesting the arrest of its own editor, Wei Jingsheng, 29, the journal complained: "Where is freedom of speech in China? All criticism is fiercely suppressed as contrary to socialism and to the dictatorship of the proletariat. What brutal hypocrisy!" A wall poster responding to Deng's speech sneered that he and his Politburo cronies were "successors and followers" of the Gang of Four-the clique headed by Mao's widow Jiang Qing (Chiang Ch'ing)-who had been Deng's most bitter...