Word: russia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Pasternak declined to join the chorus. "What I saw could not be expressed in words," Russia's greatest modern poet recalled in an unpublished memoir. "There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness. I fell ill. For an entire year I could not write." What he had glimpsed was the consequences of Stalin's war against his country's peasantry, otherwise known as the collectivization of agriculture. Between 1929 and 1934, 20 million family farms had disappeared. So had the kulaks...
...since Slim Pickens rode a rocket to Russia in Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick's Cold War comedy classic, has a film stared so unabashedly down the throat of Armageddon. But whereas Dr. Strangelove's power stems from the way Kubrick's finger flirts with the Little Red Button, Tarkovsky presses the button down, then holds it, firmly, for two-and-a-half hours. The result is a film as difficult to assess as the Bomb itself, generating shockwaves of a political, moral, historical, and spiritual nature. The Sacrifice almost demands too much of the viewer, pushing him from breakdown...
...admirable in that it goes for everything. Tarkovsky may have the distinction of being the loudest and most pitch-perfect primal screamer in the history of Cold War cinema. Other directors seem to be doing semaphore and dumbshow, by comparison. The Sacrifice, filmed with Swedish and British actors by Russia's premiere film auteur, comes off like everybody's end-of-the-world nightmare dubbed in raving Esperanto. It's not the kind of movie you'd put into a time capsule; it's the time capsule itself, with everything inside...
That's because a team from Russia will be visiting Cambridge as well...
With his neatly trimmed mustache, pursed lips and pince-nez spectacles, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov seemed the embodiment of "the best filing clerk in Russia," as Revolutionary Leader Vladimir Lenin once called him. But his bland appearance, which led one British diplomat to compare him to a "refrigerator when the lights have gone out," was deceptive. In a political and diplomatic career that spanned the first four decades of Soviet history, Molotov earned the sobriquets "Old Stone Bottom" and "Mr. Iron Pants" from those who witnessed his legendary staying power at the negotiating table. Before his death...