Word: stalinized
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...American television crews were lying in wait outside the exclusive Sovietskaya Hotel last week, when the frumpy woman in fur hat and buttoned-up coat appeared in the company of a burly escort. Since Joseph Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva, 58, returned to Moscow last month after 17 years in exile in the West, she has been playing hide-and-seek with Western reporters. She reacted in anger to the latest ambush. "I am not going to talk to you, not one word," she snapped. "You have no right. You are uncivilized people. You are savages." When asked about...
Seventeen years ago, Joseph Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva took a taxi in New Delhi to the U.S. embassy, where she asked American officials for asylum. The Soviets had allowed her to visit India in order to take home the ashes of her common-law husband, who had died of a respiratory disease. After asylum was granted, she flew to New York, where she greeted reporters at the airport with "Hello there, everybody." She explained her electrifying defection by declaring that in the U.S. she would seek "the self-expression that has been denied me so long in Russia...
...leaders no doubt welcomed the return of the dictator's daughter as a propaganda victory, there would be no dancing in Red Square. Since her 1967 defection, Svetlana had frequently denounced the Soviet regime in books and interviews. She called the Bolshevik revolution a tragedy for Russia and characterized Stalin as "a moral and spiritual monster." Repudiating her Soviet citizenship, she ritually burned her passport...
Vishnevskaya joined the Bolshoi Theater in 1952 when Stalin still acted as the opera's imperial patron. Millions of rubles were spent on the opulent sets and costumes for spectacles like Prince Igor and Boris Godunov. Seated in a heavily guarded box, Stalin reveled in the gilt-and-rhinestone production numbers as he munched on hard-boiled eggs. He had no knowledge of music. Once at an intermission he summoned to his loge the distinguished Bolshoi conductor Samuil Samosud and told him strongly that the performance "is lacking flats." Samosud had the wit to reply: "Good, Comrade Stalin. Thank...
...book's most affecting passages concern the tortured destiny of Shostakovich, whose servility to the Soviet authorities Vishnevskaya defends with the ferocity of friendship. She was not old enough in 1936 to understand the humiliation heaped on the composer when Stalin took exception to his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. But she was witness in 1965 to the drastic changes Shostakovich made in the score and libretto when a movie, renamed Katerina Izmailova, was made of his musical drama. Soviet censors lagged behind their American counterparts where sex was concerned. Vishnevskaya's account of the filming...