Word: stalinist
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...Almost from its inception as an instrument of "revolutionary justice" following the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviet secret police, known successively as the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, MGB and, since 1954, the KGB, has been synonymous with terror and coercion. It brings to mind the worst excesses of the Stalinist period: the public show trials and confessions exacted through torture, the random arrests and midnight executions in the infamous Lubyanka prison. KGB "sleepers" penetrating to the heart of Western intelligence services are now a staple of espionage fiction, film?and reality. Reports that Bulgarian agents in Rome may have aided...
...Soviet Historian Roy Medvedev's monumental 1971 study of the Stalin era, Let History Judge, the author sounded a warning note: "Not everything connected with Stalinism is behind us, by no means everything. The process of purifying the Communist movement, of washing out all the layers of Stalinist filth, is not yet finished." Those words rang true last week when the Soviet Union's top law enforcement agency warned Medvedev to "cease hostile activities" or face criminal charges...
...Yuri Andropov?unreconstructed Stalinist despot or pro-Western reformer? Little is known about him, and even less can be surmised from the bare facts of his career. Says Historian James Billington, director of Washington's Woodrow Wilson International Center: "The successor had to rise through the system, and the garb he put on for the ascent is not necessarily the garb he will wear when he is in power...
...Maximum Leader and Supreme Baby Kisser of the Soviet Peoples has come back to greet us. Who would ever have supposed that the most immediately memorable show in New York City's SoHo, at the start of the 1982 art season, would be a gallery full of mock Stalinist socialist realism, done in the correct borsch-and-gravy colors of official Soviet art 30 years ago? But there is nothing that pluralism will not give us; and so it is with the exhibition by Vitaly Komar (a name that, in Russian, means "mosquito") and Alexander Melamid, which grandly fills...
...Rubens or a Titian, a Velasquez or a Bernini, to fawn on him for a suitable fee. It is the nature of carnivores to get power, at which point, having disposed of their enemies, they deploy the emollient powers of Great Art to make them look like herbivores. Stalinist socialist realism was merely the end of this process, carried out by hacks. After it, the more intelligent of the Beloved Leaders would want radio and TV, not painting, to be their cosmeticians. We must thank Melamid and Komar for reminding us what towering heights of awfulness the great lost tradition...