Word: solzhenitsyn
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Medvedev likes to quote another historian, Jules Michelet, who defined his profession as "the action of bringing things back to life." Scarcely anyone does that better than Medvedev. All existing portraits of Stalin, even one drawn by a great novelist like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, seem bland in comparison with the real-life killer who charges through the pages of Let History Judge. Although the statistics amassed by Medvedev are overwhelming -- he conservatively estimates that no fewer than 5 million Soviet citizens were arrested from 1936 through 1938 -- it is the telling human detail that brings alive Stalin's wickedness...
...Soviet people now know what it is like not to fear. They have learned the joys (and, yes, the frustrations) of a feisty press. They have had Pasternak returned to them and have openly called for the publication of Solzhenitsyn. They have tasted the fruits of private marketplaces and cooperative cafes, discovered the potential (and, yes, the frustrations) of private entrepreneurship; they have watched candidates debate on television and be asked whether they believe in God. And they have read articles brushing the dust off Trotsky, probing the demonic mind of Stalin and introducing them to the ideas of Lech...
...three-page report that gave many Soviet citizens their first look inside the forbidding KGB building on Moscow's Dzerzhinsky Square. Nedelya Editor in Chief Vitali Syrokomsky and photographer Viktor Akhlomov toured the KGB's headquarters, a KGB officers' academy and the notorious Lefortovo prison, where Natan Sharansky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and many lesser-known dissidents have been detained. What Syrokomsky and Akhlomov saw, of course, was carefully screened; they were not allowed into the KGB communications center, laboratories and interrogation rooms. And conspicuously absent from Nedelya's pages was any insight into Vladimir Kryuchkov, the new chief...
...possibilities of glasnost. Sometimes he muses about expanding his spectrum of guests. Since he is an avid fan of classical music, he is eager to interview international artists like Leonard Bernstein and even emigre cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Nor would he rule out a broadcast with exiled novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He has also considered bringing on leading Soviet economists and politicians. Says he: "We now read the papers and watch TV in a kind of ecstasy, as if something extraordinary has happened. But what is so extraordinary about it? We are simply beginning to live a normal life...
...coming of age" is at least as important to the film as its didactic purpose (it was filmed in Zambia, where the ANC has its headquarters), and it certainly fleshes out the sometimes monotonous prison scenes. Not that the viewer ever feels the film is an adaptation of Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch; it's never dull. But it does sparkle more when it's scrutinizing the Roth family than when it's ridiculing the Afrikaner police inspector...