Word: sovietized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...enigmatic Russian artist Pavel Filonov, recognition has been painfully slow in coming. In the 1930s, the Soviet state made him a nonperson for being "hostile to socialism." Marginalized, his work banned, he died in December 1941, at the age of 58, along with more than 800,000 other victims who starved during the Nazi siege of Leningrad; his faded artistic prominence was enough to secure him no more than a grave of his own. His works resurfaced only under Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika reform when in 1988 the State Russian Museum in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) mounted an exhibition...
...That is still a distant prospect, but Filonov's place in the teeming history of early Soviet art has been secured. Back in 1988, the first Filonov show in 56 years was received mostly as a novelty. Now, Witness of the Unseen treats Filonov's oeuvre as classic art that commands the same depth of regard that Filonov invested in it. His aesthetic achievements are enough to mark him out as an utter original. Behind them lurk the bittersweet discoveries of an artist who plunged deeply into human dejection even as he reached for a beauty...
...This was definitely the family business," a Western official says. The tribal chief's family had had its vicissitudes: the communists who ruled Afghanistan till 1989 had stripped them of their land, and the teenage Noorzai went off to fight alongside the mujahedin in their war against the occupying Soviet forces. After the Soviets left, Noorzai made several thousand dollars recovering Stinger missiles at the behest of U.S. agents. After the war, Noorzai allegedly returned to the family trade. By 1993 the DEA was describing Noorzai as a "wealthy heroin warlord and well-known drug trafficker...
...famously championed by Norman Mailer. Fisher is no stranger to bad guys. In the 1990s, Fisher defended Haji Ayub Afridi, a man widely believed to be one of Pakistan's major narcotraffickers, as well as someone who was thought to have worked closely with the CIA during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Afridi served 3 1/2 years for drug trafficking, a verdict that at the time was considered a defeat for the prosecution. Fisher does not apologize for his current client. This case, he asserts, "is about the [Bush Administration's] incompetence in waging the war on terror in Afghanistan...
...dinner?'' ''We gave up having lunch and dinner to show our revolutionary zeal. Actually everyone was hungry, but nobody wanted to be the first to leave.'' ''What did you write about?'' ''Oh, slogans and denunciations against all China's enemies -- Taiwan, Japan, Britain, the U. S. and the Soviet Union.'' On the night of Aug. 18, my daughter's 23rd birthday, I invited Li Zhen, a woman professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, to dinner. Things were bad there, she told me. ''All classes have stopped. Everybody has to write Big Character Posters. Do you know...