Word: stalinize
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...joke that Muscovites tell about their economic system involves Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, who are riding a special train. When the engine breaks down, Stalin has the crew shot. Nothing happens. After a while, Khrushchev rehabilitates the engineers. Still no movement. Finally, Brezhnev pulls down the shades and sighs, "Well, let's pretend we are moving...
This deep hostility to modernism, a permanent legacy of Stalin, seems especially ironic to Western eyes because it was in Russia, between 1910 and 1925, that one of the great experiments of modern art was carried out. The leaders of the avantgarde, among them Kasimir Malevich, Naum Gabo, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, wanted to serve the new power of the left by combining revolutionary art with revolutionary politics. Russian constructivism was, in fact, the only heroic modernist style that drew its strength from the revolutionary impetus. Yet its sin was in being abstract, and for that...
According to the dogma of Socialist Realism, all art and literature must conform to the triple standard of partinost (party character), ideinost (socialist content) and narodnost (closeness to the people). For Stalin, this ideal was most faithfully reflected in the work of his favorite painter, Alexander Gerasimov, whose portraits of the dictator in various noble poses hung in museums, offices, factories and homes everywhere. At the same time, in the '30s and '40s, Stalin used every kind of coercion to apply the Socialist Realism doctrine, destroying the avant-garde and the contacts with Western artists that it needed...
...religious influence in schools. Intense atheism campaigns in the 1920s and '30s led to the imprisonment and death of thousands of priests and the desecration of countless churches. In the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, workers boasted that they burned 20,000 icons in socialist competition. By 1939, when Stalin signed his pact with Hitler, the Russian Orthodox Church had only 100 or so churches open throughout the Soviet Union, compared with 40,437 before the Revolution...
...Hitler violated the pact, and his mechanized divisions drove deep into the Soviet Union. The all-but-crushed church called upon the faithful to defend Mother Russia and quickly raised 300 million rubles for the Red Army. In desperate need of a spiritual force that could bolster national solidarity, Stalin allowed the church more freedom. Since then, except for a strong antireligious period in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the church's right to peaceful coexistence with atheism has not been seriously threatened...