Word: stalinization
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...functioned as personal censor for Pushkin and banished Dostoyevsky to Siberia. Revolution only encouraged the Russian candle-snuffers. Lenin said, "Ideas are much more fatal things than guns," a founder's nihil obstat that culminated in the years of poet destruction (Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva) and book murder under Stalin...
...figure came at a heated session of the Politburo last week to calm the increasingly public dispute over the limits of reform. Ligachev embodied the critical backlash against the new openness, which has brought freer discussion of abuses in Soviet society today and the brutal repression of the Stalin era. As the party's ideological watchdog, Ligachev strongly believed that this relaxation was becoming a dangerous weapon in the hands of anti-Soviet forces, as well as a destabilizing force within the country...
What apparently spurred Ligachev into open criticism was the unprecedented accounts in the Soviet press of the excesses of the Stalin era, which had been largely hidden from the public for decades. Although Gorbachev encouraged this examination of the past, Ligachev chastised editors for going too far with Stalin exposes, accusing them of a "disrespectful attitude toward those generations that built socialism." In a February speech to party leaders, he again complained of people who "try to present our history as a chain of mistakes and crimes and to gloss over great achievements of the past and present." Added Ligachev...
...said that large collective farms, which were set up in the 1930s under Stalin, have "outlived themselves." He predicted that they will eventually be replaced by smaller collectives and small family farms...
Trenchant jokes about the Soviet regime have been an underground art form since the early days of Stalin. But those with their wits about them kept their barbs to themselves. Comedian Arkady Raikin went about as far as any comic could when, in the late 1970s, he publicly poked fun at Leonid Brezhnev's bushy eyebrows. A year before Gorbachev came to power a Moscow comedian was banned from television for a year for making fun of an unnamed KGB general. But when Mikhail Zadornov, a Leningrad satirist and television personality, submitted his story to Theater, the editors apparently thought...