Word: stalinism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...single art event symbolized Russia's thawed relations to its own modernist past, it was the show at the Tretyakov Art Gallery in Moscow last winter by a painter and mystic who died in 1935, well into the Stalin era, and whose work remained buried for decades thereafter: Kasimir Malevich...
...optimists. Fifteen years ago, Leonid Brezhnev's officials sent plainclothes militia and bulldozers to break up and bury an outdoor show of unofficial art in Sokolniki, a park on the outskirts of Moscow. This goons' picnic would not be repeated today. The socialist realist line, imposed by Stalin after 1929 and kept to the end of Brezhnev's reign, held that a work of art should fulfill the criteria of partinost (party spirit), ideinost (firm commitment to prescribed ideology) and narodnost (true portrayal of the life, soul and spirit of the people). It has now been undone. "Dissident" modernism became...
...aside for watching trend-setting "musical- information shows" such as View or the monthly video digest Before and After Midnight, or for perusing the thick monthlies like Novy Mir and Znamya, which Soviets affectionately call the "fat journals." If the short-lived liberalization that followed the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 was known as "the thaw," the cultural revolution set in motion by Mikhail Gorbachev has proved to be nothing less than a spring flood...
...more theoretical level, perestroika has been attacked by conservative intellectuals who improbably combine a nationalist nostalgia for Russian Orthodoxy and the Stalin era with a xenophobic hatred of corrupt Western influences on Soviet life. Many of these critics belong to the Writers' Union of the Russian Federal Republic, the largest of the U.S.S.R.'s 15 constituent republics. The literary monthly Nash Sovremennik has denounced rock music and beauty pageants as demeaning influences on Russian culture. Such writers as Yuri Bondarev and Vasily Belov have attacked the de-Stalinization process for defaming a period when, despite Stalin's tyranny, the Soviet...
...bones were unearthed, along with paraphernalia of everyday life -- remnants of packed lunches, purses filled with kopecks -- indicating that the people had been snatched from their daily routines to be shot. With that, the truth became clear: from 1937 until the approach of Nazi invaders in 1941, Joseph Stalin's secret police had used the Kurapaty forest as a killing field. Estimates of the number of men and women buried there range from 30,000 to more than...