Word: stalinization
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Glasnost has given Soviets an unprecedented look into their history. One result: rehabilitation for perhaps millions of people, including many of those villainized for blatantly political purposes during Joseph Stalin's long and dictatorial reign...
...Soviet environmental disaster has been a long time in the making. Beginning in the days of Stalin, ecological concerns were shunted aside in the rush toward industrialization. Valovaya produktsiya, a phrase that translates into "gross output" and is abbreviated as val, was at the heart of the problem. Industry bureaucrats have long been evaluated -- and rewarded -- only in terms of gross output. Rivers were fouled and forests stripped in the rush to transform raw materials into material wealth. No premium was placed on efficiency, and no environmental concerns restrained val. Trucks in Siberia, for example, are still left running every...
...really like Cheers. Probably the biggest plague of my life is all the time I waste. What I don't like is getting up early. In that respect, a Navy career has been tough on me. You know, the Russians do a lot of work at night -- at least Stalin did. So did Churchill. That life-style has an appeal...
...Rudkin's elegant screenplay, Shostakovich (Ben Kingsley) negotiates his artistic salvation through public acquiescence, gratefully accepting his humiliation at a 1948 Soviet Composers' Union meeting and ritualistically denouncing Stravinsky at a conference the next year in New York City. Always he is haunted by the doom- laden specter of Stalin (Terence Rigby), who is seen thumbing through dossiers while sitting by the telephone, dispatching his opponents to their graves simply by raising the handset from the cradle...
Palmer makes little pretense to literalism, preferring to relate the composer's spiritual odyssey through stark images. Shot mostly in gritty black and white, the film often turns phantasmagorical; near the end, the ghost of * Stalin appears to the dying composer and tells him, "I am the enemy you loved." For all Shostakovich's hatred of the dictator, Palmer seems to be saying, without Stalin there would have been no intimate, brooding string quartets, no enigmatic, valedictory Fifteenth Symphony. By giving Shostakovich something to hate and fear, Stalin turned him into a great composer. The symphonies dedicated to the state...