Word: stalinize
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...barbaric tribe from 433 to 453; Ivan the Terrible, nogoodnik Tsar of Russia from 1547 to 1584; Catherine de Medicis, Machiavelli-mentored Queen of France from 1547 to 1589 and noted butcher of Protestants; Abdul-Hamid II, murderous ruler of the Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1909; Joseph Stalin, Soviet leader from 1929 to 1953; Adolf Hitler, an automatic club member as leader of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945; Mao Tse-tung, Chinese Communist leader from 1949 to 1976; and the only living honoree, Uganda's brutish, exiled Dictator Idi Amin. Seven politicians, a barbarian, a lady...
...Stalin's time, certainly, poetry had the power to arouse the wrath of a dictator bent on destroying his country's intellectual and spiritual resources. At the same time, poetry had the power to console Stalin's victims, as has been amply documented in the writings of survivors of Stalin's gigantic Gulag of prisons, camps and places of exile. A compelling example is Eugenia Ginzburg's description of solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison in Yaroslavl. A former schoolteacher and an ardent Communist, Ginzburg was arrested in 1937, like millions of other innocent...
Evil abounds in the world evoked by Ginzburg. The Kolyma region where she was ultimately imprisoned was the largest and most terrible of the Stalin-era concentration-camp complexes, stretching a thousand miles from the Arctic Ocean to the Sea of Okhotsk. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has called Kolyma "the pole of cold and cruelty." It was a place of massacre, where 3 million died, the men digging for gold under the permafrost, the women felling trees at temperatures of -56° F. Young men dispatched to the mines quickly succumbed to tuberculosis. Ginzburg, who acted for a time as a medical...
Ginzburg experienced not only friendship and love in Kolyma but also snatches of happiness. The post-Stalin years found her desirous, not of bloody vengeance, like many ex-prisoners, but of telling her story of good and evil to Russia and the world. As her husband observed, "You just aren't very good at hating " How striking is the difference between Ginzburg's account of the camps and that of Solzhenitsyn, whose governing passion in the writing of The Gulag Archipelago was an unconquerable rage. No outsider in the West can hazard a judgment...
only in the province of irony. He can no longer adhere to the liturgical beliefs of his father, but he refuses the blandishments of Stalin's comrades, many of whom will later perish in the Gulag. On his way to Paris, he rides through Germany eating matzohs and looking numbly through train windows at German flags displaying an unfamiliar design: the swastika...