Word: stalinist
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...machinery according to the wishes of the Politburo and the party secretaries. To satisfy so many constituencies, as he evidently did, Kania needed considerable bureaucratic skill-and the political finesse of a big-city mayor. As security chief, he expanded his power base while weeding out Gomulka loyalists and Stalinist diehards...
...disappointment was as great as the hope. By 1930, Stalinist terror had set out to destroy all that was best in the visual culture of Russia: painting, sculpture, design, film. By 1950, the destruction was done. To this day the most brilliant moment of revolutionary aspiration in the history of Russian art remains not only unofficial but actively repressed within the borders of its own country. Last year the U.S.S.R. sent a mammoth consignment of modernist Russian art to the Pompidou Center's exhibition, "Paris-Moscow, 1900-1930"- while at the same time ensuring, by the threat of cancellation...
...with asphalt, but a few blades of green grass will always break through," concluded Soviet Novelist Ilya Ehrenburg, as the Stalin era faded. And still they come: surprising new writers who have shattered the deadening conventions of the past. They have recoiled from the novel, viewing it as prefabricated Stalinist architecture. The genre of choice is the short story or novella. Many writers have managed gradually to escape from Socialist Realism, with its obligatory jargon and hortatory themes, traveling a world away -back to 19th century realism. Even Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the two major Russian writers to produce...
...Steel Bird, which was published last year in the U.S., marks Aksyonov's break with realism in favor of the grotesque. This novella features a ghastly humanoid with a metal carapace who blackmails the superintendent of an apartment house into letting him live in the elevator. Acting with Stalinist guile, the steel bird takes over the entire building and its tenants. The structure soon collapses; the creature is left to roost triumphantly atop the elevator shaft, surveying the debris...
...persecution is his celebrated novella, Faithful Ruslan, which has circulated all over the country in samizdat; it was published in the U.S. last year by Simon & Schuster. Ruslan tells of a concentration-camp dog, pitilessly trained to guard convicts, that becomes a stray when most of the Stalinist camps are closed down in 1956. Ruslan, and other dogs of his kind, keep a vigil at the local railway station, hoping for the arrival of the familiar convoys of prisoners whom they can once again herd to the camp. "Anyone who waits with such single-minded devotion is always rewarded...