Word: stalinize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Since 1989, cities from the Danube to the Urals have heard the liberating thud of bronze Lenins being pulled from their pedestals. But the biggest migration of images into oblivion began in 1956, three years after the Maximum Leader's death, when Nikita Khrushchev made a speech denouncing Joseph Stalin...
Throughout his rule, Stalin had sponsored a form of state art officially known as Socialist Realism. Geared to a naive, not to say brutish, mass public barely literate in artistic matters, Soviet Socialist Realism was the most coarsely idealistic kind of art ever foisted on a modern audience -- though Capitalist Realism, the never-never land of desire created by American advertising, runs it a close second...
...young man Stalin had been snubbed by the Russian intellectual elite. His revenge was to grind their faces in the ice of miracle, mystery and authority, to make culture into a form of ventriloquism from on high. Socialist Realism was a religious art celebrating the transcendent power of communist ideology, the impending heaven of world socialism and the godlike benignity of its father, Lenin's successor, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, the man of steel. And like the traditional icons of Christ and the saints it replaced, the stuff was omnipresent. No square or schoolroom in Russia lacked its image of Stalin...
This is the climactic scene of Oles Yanchuk's Famine-33, a scarifying film about the real-life murder and starvation of more than 6 million Ukrainians by Stalin's bureaucrats in 1932-33. Not many Americans will see this picture, which opened last week in one New York City theater; stark, iconic, black-and- white Ukrainian movies, especially when their subject is "the hidden Holocaust," have limited mall appeal. But in its meticulously brutal imagery, in its theme of humanity enslaved and justice outraged, in its Manichaean categorizing of people as holy victims or soulless villains, Famine...
...religion. The document also outlaws home searches without a court order, protects the privacy of mail and telephone communications and explicitly forbids the use of torture. But words on paper do not make a law-governed state. Russians remember grandiloquent provisions on human rights contained in constitutions written for Stalin in 1936 and Leonid Brezhnev in 1977 -- rights they never enjoyed. Without stable government institutions in place to enforce the constitution, this document might suffer the same fate...