Word: recantation
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Teacher of Love." The surface facts were easy enough to establish. Tito, in the Cominform's book of charges, was guilty of putting Yugoslavia (and himself) ahead of the Soviet Union (and Joseph Stalin). The Cominform did not really expect Tito to recant; they had tried this for weeks without success. Now they were putting it up to his party comrades in Yugoslavia to oust him and to "raise from below a new internationalist leadership...
...play tells of Alexander Soren (Alfred Drake), a brilliant, self-admiring vice president in charge of production who unintentionally speaks up for the freedom of the screen-and is quickly made to feel the serfdom of its employees. Ordered by the big boss to recant, Soren is egged on by his best girl (Marsha Hunt) to rebel. About 15 minutes before the final curtain, he finds himself both jobless and blacklisted. But Hollywood itself could not find shabbier ways, in those 15 minutes, of arranging a happy ending...
Prokofiev didn't show up in person to recant his sins. He was ill, the meeting was told. But he was already at work on a new opera about a Soviet pilot who learned to fly again after losing both legs. He promised to follow party directives, and use plenty of Russian folk songs. So did the other six composers spanked by the party. (The promise came easiest to Aram Khachaturian, who has always borrowed freely from Russian folk music.) Two other composers-one was Dmitri Kabalevsky -who were not even named in the decree, confessed their errors...
...accept the Central Committee's decree, particularly regarding myself, as stern but fatherly care. ... A worthy reply . . . may be achieved by work-stubborn, creative, joyous work ... on new compositions which will find a path to the heart of the Soviet people." Shostakovich was the last to recant; now all Soviet composers could go on with their joyous labors...
Party polemicists pounced on Varga and skinned him alive in various high-toned journals. He was given a chance to recant, but refused. Thereupon he was dismissed from his post as head of the Academy of Science's Institute of World Economics and World Politics. The institute was abolished. Twenty other top Soviet economists were in disgrace along with Varga; their mistake was that they did not listen to a proverb common among embattled Soviet economists: "It is better to defend the government's figures than to go to jail for your...