Word: stalinization
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...city's Usher Hall the conductor Gustavo Dudamel is having difficulty with the strings. It is the final rehearsal of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10, and Dudamel wants the violins to be more biting and caustic. Any successful performance of Shostakovich's 10th must reflect its historical context: Stalin's purges; some 20 million dead; a composer who lived in constant fear of the knock on the door. "Muchachos," Dudamel says, searching for the right expression. "Pop pop pop!" he says, mimicking the sound of a firing squad...
...elaborate charade of feigned friendship between Putin and President George W. Bush, begun several years ago when Bush testified to the alleged spiritual depth of his Russian counterpart's soul, hasn't helped. The fact that similarly staged "friendships"--between F.D.R. and "Uncle Joe" Stalin, Nixon and Brezhnev, Clinton and Yeltsin--ended in mutual disappointment did not prevent Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from boasting not long ago that U.S.-Russian relations were now the best in history. Surely it would be preferable to achieve a genuine, sustainable improvement before staging public theatrics designed to create the illusion that...
...analyst for RusEnergy, Russia's authoritative energy think tank. Though Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller is also a Putin man, Medvedev was installed directly by the Kremlin independently of Miller, Krutikhin maintains. Both toe the same line, but the Kremlin runs them separately. Mutual mistrust makes for cooperation, to paraphrase Stalin...
...desperate combat, which cost the lives of some 27 million Soviet citizens. Historians still argue why the first months of war proved so disastrous to Soviet forces and how they recovered to strike back. The answer is that not many were all that eager to fight for the Stalin dictatorship, as the Germans invaded. But the horror and terror of Nazism, unleashed on the conquered territories, forced the people to fight back for survival and turned the conflict into the Great Patriotic War, Stalin...
...reopened with full military and state honors) now extends into warning signals to Poland which plans to move several hundred Communist-era memorials, including Soviet ones. Indeed, the USSR lost 640,000 soldiers liberating Poland, and their memory must forever be respected. But they died liberating Poland because Stalin and Hitler had carved up that country in 1939. A real tragedy of the war was that Soviet soldiers "boldly entered foreign capitals and came back to their own one in fear," to quote the Nobel Prize Winner poet Josef Brodsky. They destroyed Nazism, but, in a bitter twist of history...