Word: stalinist
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...Germany from the Soviet Union (where he had spent the war years), Ulbricht was Moscow's man. Tireless and ruthless, he copied much of the repressive Soviet system. As head of the German Democratic Republic, he stamped out all political opposition, attempted to repress religion, and introduced a Stalinist-style censorship of all publications, broadcasts and literature. East German schools became Marxist indoctrination centers...
Eventually that book became an increasingly intolerable burden to the new leadership of the Communist Party. In the shifts of party policy that followed Khrushchev's downfall, mere mention of any crimes committed in the Stalinist era was anathema. Friends of Solzhenitsyn who tried to defend his subsequent anti-Stalinist books (including The Cancer Ward and The First Circle) were condemned by the official press, and many lost their jobs. Solzhenitsyn himself was ousted from the Soviet Writers Union...
...other part of the film's importance is due to the politics surrounding it. In Z, Costa-Gavras won the love of the liberal and left intelligentsia for his condemnation of Greek fascism. The liberals stayed with him through the anti-Stalinist Confession, but many further to the left criticized it as too concerned with so-called humanist questions rather than political questions. As a result, all of the straight-line CP actors left State of Siege early on in the filming...
Their presence enforces a policy of repression in Czechoslovakia known as "consolidation"; it has been carried out with a thoroughness reminiscent of the Stalinist purges of the 1950s. Although people do not simply disappear any more, and the wide-scale arrests that were anticipated after the invasion have not taken place, 46 liberals were tried and sentenced this year, and more are under detention. Party Chief Gustav Husák, himself a purge victim during Czechoslovakia's Stalin era, has "consolidated" the Communist Party, cutting back its membership by almost one-half, to a total...
...scenarist calls "one of the most documented murders in history." Jacson, for example, did have a girl friend who visited Trotsky and sometimes assisted him with secretarial work. Although the real Jacson never admitted to any motive for the murder, he is widely believed to have been a Stalinist agent. In the film, however, Losey makes a sonorous attempt to turn the murder into an oblique existential tract and the assassin into a schizoid avenging angel. Like characters in such previous and more estimable Losey films as The Servant and Accident, Jacson is a scarred and desperate man, searching...