Word: soviet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After all the horrors of the Soviet Union--the gulag, the secret police, the famines, the totalitarian control over every aspect of life--is it possible that the citizens of Russia would voluntarily return power to the Communists? In the coming weeks they may very well do just that, by electing a Communist as their President. What would induce a people to take such a step? The Russians have enjoyed unprecedented tastes of freedom over the past few years, and the process began so hopefully, even heroically. Now the descendants of Stalin's victims are poised to welcome as their...
...capital that he visited after the unsuccessful 1993 rebellion failed to dislodge him from the Kremlin. Back then, conditions in the city were improving after decades of shortages, but residents still remembered taking the four-hour "sausage train" to Moscow simply to purchase basic foodstuffs, and the old Soviet-era joke was retold regularly: "Do you have meat here?" a customer asks. "No," says the shopkeeper. "Here we don't have fish; it's at the other store that they don't have meat." Yeltsin was nevertheless the triumphant victor over revanchism, and in Yaroslavl that day he was hailed...
Russia today is a postcommunist, not a democratic society--and that is partly Yeltsin's fault. He is the only politician of sufficient stature in the post-Soviet period who could have created an "anticommunist" party committed to reform. Instead he chose a politics of charisma, believing his populist appeal would be more effective in ensuring support for reform than would the enlistment of local activists to promote his views. By allowing reform to become identified with one powerful personality--his own--Yeltsin failed to create a constituency for change that could survive if he became unpopular. And now that...
This means that, while he didn't dare speak out on behalf of persecuted writers like Babel, Mandelstam or Anna Akhmatova during the Stalin years, Ehrenburg worked assiduously to resurrect their reputations in the more lenient Khrushchev period. As Rubinstein documents, Ehrenburg used his position as the Soviet writer best known to the Western intelligentsia in order to blackmail the censors: he would repeatedly announce the publication of a controversial book or article, then protest that its failure to appear due to censorship would reflect badly on the Soviet regime in the West...
...also true that Ehrenburg protested the regime's abuses as far as he could without losing his privileged position. He refused to sign the most egregiously pro-Stalin public statements of his fellow writers, worked hard to document the Nazi massacre of Jews despite official Soviet disapproval, and was one of the first public figures to speak out against Stalin after his death, in his novel The Thaw...