Word: stalinism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first weeks of the semester, there were many surprises. At Middlebury, Sergey Plyasunov, 22, has discovered what it is like to study the Soviet Union "from the other side." Says he: "I find out things that I didn't learn in my own country about the highest powers like Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev." Not all the teaching goes unchallenged. At Wheaton, Sabyrova takes issue with an American textbook that describes the Soviet economy as entirely planned. "It is wrong," she insists. "With economic reform there are a lot of changes in our country." Meanwhile at Oberlin, Killu Tyugu...
...next President will inherit an accretion of earlier guiding principles named after his various predecessors. Joseph Stalin's probes provoked the Truman Doctrine: "It must be the policy of the U.S. to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." The U.S. set about, through a combination of diplomacy, economic assistance and military alliances, to create an international environment that would "contain" the Soviet empire within its own boundaries, forcing the Marxist-Leninist-Stali nist system to stew in its own poisonous juices. The author of that strategy, George Kennan, believed Soviet Communism...
...deed of ultra-rightists linked to the CIA and carrying out the will of the oil magnates of Texas." Texts on Soviet history tend to celebrate triumph after triumph, from the success of the Revolution to victory in World War II to the launch of Sputnik. They gloss over Stalin's purges, the starvation of millions during the collectivization of farms, military blunders that nearly lost the war to Hitler and corruption in the Brezhnev era. Meanwhile, an elementary primer claims, "The leadership of the party of Communists is working well and is building a new, happy life...
While awaiting a new generation of textbooks, teachers of history glean material from glasnost-era news articles telling long-repressed tales, such as that of Nikolai Bukharin, whose free-market economics (presaging Gorbachev's) helped get him executed by Stalin. The impact of these makeshift texts is already apparent in the discussions in Yamburg's Moscow classroom, where 15- year-olds recently debated Stalin's role in Soviet history. "He had a lot to do with the industrialization and collectivization of our country," asserted one blond-haired boy. But a classmate countered, "Some consider him a criminal because he ruined...
...Stalin despised it as "decadent bourgeois formalism" and had it locked away. Khrushchev called it excrement and branded its creators "pederasts." Brezhnev ordered bulldozers to smash it into the ground at an outdoor exhibit. Such has been the fate of Russia's modernist art at the hands of dictators bent on enforcing their philistine tastes with the whole armamentarium of the totalitarian state. Even Mikhail Gorbachev has found that the tradition of putting down avant-garde art dies hard among cultural bureaucrats. As a result, the visual arts have been far slower than literature and music to benefit from glasnost...