Word: stalinize
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Very early on, while others dismissed Hitler as an unimportant barbarian, Malcolm Muggeridge described the Nazi rise as a threat to civilization. He also fellow-traveled to the Soviet Union in 1932 and found Joseph Stalin a dangerous influence. Sounding alarms to the readership of the Guardian had little effect-except on the Muggeridge style. Soon he was deriding his own trade: "The only fun of journalism is that it puts you in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them or take them seriously. It is the ideal profession for those who find power fascinating...
Most people, in some corner of their mental luggage, carry images of F.D.R., Churchill, Stalin, Gandhi, De Gaulle, Mao and other archetypes as large in memory as Easter Island moai heads...
Right or wrong-and they have been both-left-wing intellectuals have never had much luck in America. The Depression seemed ready to trigger enduring class hatred. But radicals were mistaken about the benignity of Joseph Stalin and the possibilities of domestic Marxism. Their revolution was postponed. Then along came World War II, the postwar boom and millions of house-owning, boat-buying, TV-consuming workers, downtrodden all the way to the bank...
Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, Tenor Nicolai Gedda, Bass Dimiter Petkov, Ambrosian Opera Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Mstislav Rostropovich conductor, Angel; 3 LPs). Soviet critics thought they heard a masterpiece when this, Shostakovich's second opera, was premiered in 1934. Then Stalin walked out of a performance and they listened again. This time they heard "din, gnash and screech" (Pravda). The work was withdrawn, and Shostakovich pursued more orthodox ways. A sanitized version, unveiled in 1963, found its way to the West on records, but this is the first recording of the original score. Harsh, erotic...
...vulnerable heart at the age of 36. Obsessed with suicide all his life, he finally, for no clearly discernible reason, "did away with himself as he would an enemy," as another poet, Marina Tsvetayeva, remarked. Official reservations about Mayakovsky's posthumous status were dissipated by Stalin in 1935, when he declared him to be the most talented poet of the Soviet era. "Indifference to his memory and to his work is a crime," he added menacingly...