Word: stalinists
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...invasion; in Prague. Having fled to Poland when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, Svoboda returned in 1945 as a triumphant general, alongside Red Army forces. He became Czechoslovakia's first postwar Defense Minister and secretly abetted the Communist takeover three years later. Discredited and imprisoned during the Stalinist purges of the early '50s, he was politically resurrected by Nikita Khrushchev. In 1968, the retired general was selected as a compromise presidential candidate by liberal Czech Leader Alexander Dubcek, who hoped the choice would allay Moscow's growing doubts about Dubcek's fealty. The plan failed...
...decadent and, because of its internationalism, bourgeois-formalist. The Gulag swallowed some artists, like Boris Kushner. Others, such as Larionov, Goncharova, Gabo and Ivan Puni, went into exile. Those who stayed, like Rodchenko or the architect Konstantin Melnikov, survived as ghosts, forgotten men in a culture of vindictive Stalinist toadies. Like Cronus, the Revolution devoured its children. As a wholesale trashing of a civilization, only Hitler's demolition of the German modernists compares with it. Inside the Soviet Union, the works themselves lay buried, invisible to the people and never exported-until...
...Yugoslavia, which was expelled from the Stalinist Cominform in 1948, the church faces typical Communist harassments in attenuated form. In Hungary, it is precisely 30 years since Josef Cardinal Mindszenty was drugged, stripped naked and whipped with a rubber truncheon in preparation for his Communist Party show trial as a traitor. Today Catholic bishops are installed in every see, but the bureaucracy has control even of the assignment of priests, and it tightly restricts seminary enrollment. Czechoslovakia is nearly a throwback to Stalinism. Only three bishops, all aging, hold permanent appointments among the 13 sees. Two seminaries exist...
...emotion" during the trip. As soon as the papal jet landed, black-robed Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, 77, the Primate of Poland, mounted the steps into the plane. John Paul's shrewd former mentor has maneuvered for three decades to guide the Polish church through the darkest days of Stalinist repression into an era of uneasy coexistence with the country's Communist rulers. The extent of the church-state detente was immediately apparent: figurehead President Henryk Jablonski came to the airport to welcome John Paul, and the Pope later conferred for 30 minutes with Communist Party Secretary Edward Gierek...
...Though Stalinist-era oppression has ended, there is still tension. Said one Polish Catholic intellectual from Cracow: "You can't talk about persecution, but there is constant harassment." Religion classes remain outside the schools, and, more important, parents are pressured not to send their children. Religious broadcasts are forbidden, even of Masses that could comfort invalids. A notable exception was the four-hour telecast of Figure of crucified Christ in modernistic Nowa Huta church John Paul's installation at the Vatican. National coverage of three of this week's events has been scheduled...