Word: stalinize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Furst's perfect-pitch re-creation begins with a fatally flawed protagonist: Andre Szara, 40, Pravda reporter in Europe and occasional Soviet spy, whose life goals have been reduced to a desire to outlast Stalin's purges. As the novel opens in 1937, Szara, a Russified Polish Jew, is caught in the midst of a blood feud in the Soviet secret services between his NKVD friends, mostly Jewish intellectuals, and Stalin's Georgian thugs. The fear that dominates Szara's nomadic life is palpable: a typically chilling passage is about his return to Russia aboard a Soviet freighter with...
Unlike Malevich, Liubov Popova died young -- scarlet fever got her in 1924, before Stalin's purges could. She was only 35. At least she was spared the miseries of censorship and persecution visited on other Russian avant-gardists by Stalin. Moreover, she died at a time when it was still possible for an idealistic, exuberantly gifted young artist like herself to believe in the promise of Leninism. Her last works, such as the 1923 collage stage design for a play about the revolution called Earth in Turmoil -- showing a helmeted aviator, prototype of the new Soviet Man, gazing...
...There may be some similarity with the emergence of the U.S. at the end of World War II," suggests foreign affairs scholar Kenneth Thompson. But again there were other major figures shaping events: the Kremlin's Joseph Stalin, a menacing but victorious war leader; and Britain's Winston Churchill, the man of the half-century...
Life presents us with a hierarchy of evils. Being finite, we are forced to assign them priority and even, if necessary, tolerate some lesser evil to fight the greater. Was it wrong to have blinked at the enormities of Stalin for the four years that he was needed in the war against Hitler...
...Engineer of Human Souls (1984) -- who habitually casts a jaundiced eye on the weird world of his birthright: a subjugated land where peasants bump elbows with intellectuals and the new dogma of communism has declared war on old Roman Catholic beliefs. Consigned in 1948 to teach the wisdom of Stalin at a vocational school in the rural Czechoslovak village of Hronov, Danny fights off a venereal disease contracted earlier and, rather unsuccessfully, the temptations of his female students. While he attends Mass with Vixi, one of the more importunate of his potential seducers, in the local church, a presumptive miracle...