Word: stalinization
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Knight in the Leopard Skin Tariel, the knight in the leopard skin, was the great folk hero of Georgia -before Joseph Stalin came along. To the warlike people of the high wine-and-fruit-growing country between the Black and Caspian seas, Tariel was the perfect combination of vice and virtue. He could slash a man in two with a snap of his whip, slay 10,000 enemies in a single sortie, then weep like a woman at the thought of his own cruelty. Stalin went Tariel one better: he shed no tears. Yet all of Georgia wept when...
...tears were quite understandable. Under Stalin, Georgia was more pampered than any other Soviet republic. It received disproportionately large allocations for farms, dams and fac tories, was permitted to preserve a good deal of private initiative at a time when the rest of Russia was being brutally forced into collectivization. After Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956, all of that changed. Georgians were dropped from power in Mos cow, and Khrushchev even tore up a few of Georgia's vineyards, replanting them with his favorite crop, corn...
Nikita's successors, Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin, have taken a more sympathetic view of Stalin's historical role. The motive is not entirely clear; perhaps B. & K. are reluctant to let Red China take all the credit for Stalinism, or perhaps it has to do with inner Kremlin politics. In any case, they have not only looked the other way to avoid noticing the statues and paintings of Stalin that still adorn many a Georgian town and hotel, but they have even restored Stalin to the history books. Last week Brezhnev went a long step...
...days, workmen had been hustling to decorate Peking's Gate of Heavenly Peace, scene of Red China's monster rallies. Up around the square went pictures of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. On the facade of the gate towers went huge pictures of sunflowers bending to the sun, symbolic of the world's people being drawn to Chairman Mao Tse-tung. And on the north wall, dwarfing all the other portraits, was a tinted image of the sun god himself...
...Stalin called his work "noise, not music." Pravda once sneered that it "reeks of the bourgeois." Now the sour notes have died away, and there he was in the Moscow Conservatory, shy, bespectacled and frail as ever, answering cheers at a concert celebrating his 60th birthday. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich received another gift too: the Soviet title of Hero of Socialist Labor. Best of all was the successful first Moscow performance of his new piece, Cello Concerto No. 2, conducted by a similarly slight, bespectacled musician: Dmitri's 28-year-old son Maxim...