Word: stalinize
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...been reports that she is the niece of Gromyko (not true), that she is of Tatar descent and her actual patronymic is not Maximovna but the rather Asian-sounding Maksudovna ("I am absolutely Russian," she countered last year), that her father was a prominent official exiled to Siberia by Stalin (unlikely), that she has a brother-in-law who was a minor party official until he somehow embarrassed her husband (unconfirmed...
...swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety." Shaw's dramas brim with advocates of free thought and liberal policy, but his correspondence reveals him as a fool of the new totalitarians. Adolf Hitler is a "wonderful preacher of everything that is right and best in Toryism"; Joseph Stalin is the "greatest living statesman...
This blockbuster success was not unexpected; one might say it was virtually certain. For 20 years Soviet authorities have suppressed the publication of Rybakov's broadly autobiographical novel about power and powerlessness under Stalin just before the purges of the mid-'30s. During the '60s and '70s, the public was teased by announcements that Arbat would soon appear. It never did. Then last year Druzhba Narodov, a Soviet Writers Union periodical, serialized the work in three installments, and the stage was set for the mass market...
Criticism of Stalin is not new in the Soviet Union. For the edification of the ruling class, Nikita Khrushchev denounced the late dictator's terror tactics in a secret speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956. Intellectuals were allowed a whiff of free air in 1962 when the literary journal Novy Mir published Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novella of Stalin's prison camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. But Arbat is of a different order: it is not only indicative of Mikhail Gorbachev's leash-loosening policies but also an official seal of disapproval on the past...
Back in the Arbat, Sasha's family and friends grapple with their lives and careers, while the Kremlin bureaucracy manhandles a recalcitrant economy, ponders the growing power of Hitler's Germany and worries about which way Stalin will jump. Readers expecting a personification of moral depravity will be disappointed. Instead, Rybakov's Stalin resembles a deeply suspicious and ruthless vestige of the revolutionary past -- if not a historical necessity, at least an inevitability...