Word: stalinists
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...moment he climbs into his black ZIL limousine for the 15-minute ride from his suburban dacha to downtown Moscow. Speeding along the boulevards of the Soviet capital, he telephones the Foreign Ministry for a summary of international news. By the time he arrives at the pinnacled Stalinist skyscraper in Smolensky Square just before 9 a.m., he has been briefed on events and can plunge immediately into the pile of diplomatic cables and documents awaiting him in his seventh-floor office...
There was no mistaking the mustachioed figure with pipe in hand. Illuminated by a brilliant spotlight, Joseph Stalin had come to life onstage in a local theater production of Anatoli Rybakov's groundbreaking novel about Stalinist- era repression, Children of the Arbat. When Stalin stepped forward to deliver his monologue, a chilling silence enveloped the auditorium of the Lunacharsky Dramatic Theater. "It takes great cruelty to tap the great energy of a backward people," declaimed the provincial tyrant. "A dictator is great who can inspire love for himself through terror...
Public Prosecutor Vyaceslav Kuchmin told us that about 100 local instances of Stalinist illegalities had already been reviewed. Not that Kuchmin was in complete agreement with those critics in Moscow who he felt "showed only the negative sides of our history" and drew too many "unfair comparisons" with the U.S. "We are the same people as we were then," he explained. "We can't just exchange this nation for another...
Sharp memories of the brutal past were jogged as well by a new play, Four Interrogations, the story of an old woman unfairly charged under Stalin as an "enemy of the people." Before the curtain rises, the audience sits in darkness while voices screech Stalinist slogans over a loudspeaker. Then an imposing photo of Stalin is projected onto a black curtain. Finally, a spotlight sweeps over the audience, stopping now and then to hold first one person, then another and another in its sudden white glare...
...magazine New Times publishes an interview with Lev Kopelev, a well- known Russian dissident who today supports perestroika from his home in Cologne, then the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya attacks Kopelev in the best traditions of Stalinist phraseology, explaining in the same breath that Kopelev is a Jew. This recalls the old Russian round-dance game in which one group of dancers sings, "And we the millet have sown and sown . . ." And the other answers, "And we the millet shall trample, trample...