Word: stalinism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Curfew's plot centers on the wake and funeral of Matilde Neruda, widow of the Nobel Laurate Pablo Neruda, who was also a well known communist and recipient of the Stalin Prize. During the course of the wake, a debate ensues as to whether the widow's last wishes should be granted...
...feudalism, almost completely bypassing the experience of bourgeois democracy. The bedbugs of feudalism and servility moved inside wooden trunks from village huts into communal apartments. Many bosses behaved like "Red feudal lords," taking away not only the peasants' land but their passports too -- and that really smacked of serfdom. Stalin's forced collectivization was a crude mockery of the slogans "Land to the Peasants" and "All Power to the Soviets...
...West for many years created an image of our country that was both attractive and frightening. The exploits of our people in the war against Hitler added an aura of heroism to that image. Khrushchev's thaw added glimmers of hope for mutual understanding. The horrible truth about Stalin's camps, the arrests of dissidents, the abuses of psychiatry, the exile of Academician Andrei Sakharov, the presence of our troops in Afghanistan -- all lined up and blown out of proportion by reactionary elements in the Western press -- worked to destroy the heroic aura, reducing our image to that...
...notion of convening a special conference is traceable to the founder of Russian Communism, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. In the early days of Soviet power, such extraordinary sessions, held between regular quinquennial party congresses, were convened to deal with emergencies, major and minor. The practice fell into disuse under Joseph Stalin's dictatorship, although it was Stalin who called the last one, in 1941, to rally the party and the country against the German invasion. Gorbachev has revived the practice in hopes that it will give impetus to his reforms and provide him with a protective mandate for his program...
...analyst's choice of language reflects the degree to which Gorbachev has adapted Western-style political techniques to Soviet politics and how he has applied them to the organization of the conference. Perhaps surprisingly for a man who was born in the closed society of Stalin and rose to prominence in the closed-minded society of Leonid Brezhnev, Gorbachev knows about the straw man, the trial balloon and the bandwagon effect, and has used them in a subtle and effective campaign to make sure that he can win next week's game of perceptions...