Word: stalinism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...this technique for contemporaries, or the recent dead, that raises problems. Now that Herman Wouk is converting his bestseller The Winds of War into a television series, he was asked by Daniel Schorr about the propriety of giving to actors impersonating Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin words that the real figures never uttered. "You have touched a very live nerve," Wouk replied. "I don't know if anyone has the answer." But some try to answer: one successful scriptwriter, David Rintels, when criticized for one of his scripts, protested, "I stuck to the record, except in intimate scenes where there...
These sentiments had become unpopular after then Party Chief Nikita Khrushchev in 1956 exposed Stalin's campaigns of mass terror against innocent Soviet citizens. In his celebrated de-Stalinization speech, Khrushchev cited the national anthem as an example of the dictator's passion for self-glorification, calling it a "clear deviation from Marxism-Leninism, debasing and belittling the role of the party." After that, the lyrics were never sung, although the tune was occasionally played on state occasions and at sports events...
...Central Committee formally decided to refurbish the old anthem with some new words. Commissioned to do the job were the two original authors, who had been paid 100,000 rubles ($19,000) when they composed the lyrics in 1943. They were two-time Stalin Prize-winning Poet Sergei Mikhalkov and Harold El-Registan, a pop songwriter best known for his operetta Only Love...
...hands at following the vagaries of the party line, Mikhalkov and El-Registan had little trouble in composing a deft change in the banned stanza about Stalin. The new last lines...
...probably the liveliest intellectual hubbub to hit Paris since the early 1950s, when Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre startled other leftist intellectuals by defending Stalin's ironfisted regime, in spite of its excesses. This time the furor revolves around a group of young intellectuals, most of them lapsed Marxists, who are now attacking Marxism as an evil, obsolete ideology that leads inevitably to totalitarianism. The "New Philosophers," as they are known, have become overnight celebrities-featured on magazine covers and on TV talk shows. The New Philosophers have no wide popular following and are unlikely to have much impact...