Word: stalinize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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ROBERT DUVALL, BULKED UP INSIDE HIS military overcoat and nearly expressionless beneath a bushy mustache, looks as much like Frankenstein's monster as Joseph Stalin in HBO's new film about the Soviet dictator. Certainly his deeds are just as monstrous, and even more unfathomable. Directed by Ivan Passer, STALIN vividly chronicles the revolutionary footsoldier's rise to power and his ruthless, increasingly paranoid reign of terror. The scenes of Stalin's 1930s' purges are especially chilling, and the film gratifyingly avoids hokey re-creations of "big" historical events like the Yalta Conference. Still, despite Duvall's intense performance...
Moreover, the artists' story is largely tragic. The revolution devoured its children. In the 1930s, after Stalin's seizure of power, the work of these artists was ruthlessly suppressed as "bourgeois formalism." It lacked the three nosts of Socialist Realism: ideinost, or belief in the class basis of truth; narodnost, or accessibility to the people; and partinost, or Party spirit. The artists now appear in the treble guise of visionaries, heroes and victims. Most art lovers probably believe, on this point, that Stalin betrayed the revolution and are unwilling to think of Lenin as the savage autocrat he was; they...
...less incriminating to the Soviet Union's communist rulers were minutes of a March 5, 1940, Politburo meeting making plain that it was Joseph Stalin who ordered the massacre of Polish officers whose bodies were later found in the Katyn Forest. Almost simultaneously with the release of the KAL transcripts, Moscow released documents showing that Stalin signed the minutes, which contained an order for "execution by a firing squad" -- without trial or indictment -- of 25,700 Polish officers and other notables...
...LATE 1930S A HARVARD STUDENT TRAVELED TO Europe to see its brutal dictatorships firsthand. He visited Mussolini's Italy, Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany. Writing in his diary, the young man confided that he had come "to the decision that Facism ((sic)) is the thing for Germany and Italy, Communism for Russia and Democracy for America and England." But when he ran for President in 1960, John F. Kennedy never had to explain that isolationist view. Nor would raising the issue have made much sense, because the mature Kennedy had long since outgrown the jottings...
...Joseph Stalin...