Word: stalinized
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...They had a blind spot," says Reichert. "Unfortunately they bought into a model without questioning it. It became their first principle to defend that country." So much so that they didn't believe reports of the Stalin purges. When the Stalin revelations became news in 1956 many of the communists became so disillusioned that they dropped out of the party. They grew more concerned with democracy. It was an ideal that many would have never dreamed of giving...
...some moments of low humor or lofty dudgeon. The author may be a bit extravagant in her criticism, as when she says that Alexander VI, the infamous Borgia Pope, was "as close to the prince of darkness as human beings are likely to come." What then of Caligula? Or Stalin? Or Hitler? But she correctly upbraids the Pontiffs for squandering the papacy's moral standing in Christendom. Whether they "provoked" the Protestant revolt, as Tuchman says, or only abetted it, they lost the respect of bishops and princes who otherwise might not have accommodated the forces of nationalism...
...arduous and often tragic for Soviet exiles, particularly for those poets and writers who fled their country after the 1917 Revolution. A few, like Vladimir Nabokov, joined the mainstream of modern literature and enriched it. A handful returned in desperation to the Soviet Union, only to perish hi Stalin's camps, like the eminent critic Dmitri Mirsky, or by suicide, as in the case of the great idiosyncratic poet Marina Tsvetayeva. Many remained stranded on alien shores where their writing disappeared with scarcely a trace...
...Communism. By contrast, there are no hidden homilies in Aksyonov's multilevel, 230,000-word novel, The Burn, which Random House will publish later this year. A denser, darker work than The Island, The Burn reflects the author's searing experience as the child of victims of Stalin's great purges. It also powerfully evokes another subject proscribed in Soviet fiction since Stalin's day: sex. It is a fact of life made frightening and moving by Aksyonov...
...finds an ingenious way to turn his obsession into a cushy government job when a Soviet laboratory purchases his prodigious production of spermatozoa for the greater glory of Communist science. In Kangaroo the author satirizes the false and often absurd confessions that were made at show trials during the Stalin era. Here an engaging professional crook admits to the rape of the oldest kangaroo in the Moscow...