Word: stalinized
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Churchill, Stalin, De Gaulle, Marshall, Hemingway, Faulkner, Picasso, MacArthur, DiMaggio, Joe Louis, all seemed to have been around forever and to have a limitless future. There was no room for small figures in the pantheon. An entire generation retreated into a posture of silence, pursuing their desires down a bland alley. Pop culture-film, comics, records and below all, TV-became the national pacifier...
WHILE I was reading through Adam Ulam's new biography, Stalin, The Man and His Era, one small passage jumped off the pages of history into our own time. It is a quote from a revolutionary journal during the Russian Revolution of 1905-6. One M. Alexandrov wrote he couldn't believe only ten years earlier political apathy among University youth was so widespread that a speaker at a students' meeting could say, "If you are studying to be a doctor then your main duty is to try to become a good doctor, if engineer to be a good engineer...
...Hegelian and Marxian determinism, the idea that vast and blind historical forces sweep across the world's stage without important regard to personalities. But of course that Marxist thought is invalidated by Marxist his tory ? the crucial "heroic" role played by men like Marx himself, and Lenin and Stalin. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. suggests that "men have lived who did what no substitute could ever have done; their intervention set history on one path rather than another. If this is so, the old maxim There are no indispensable men' would seem another amiable fallacy. There is, then, a case...
...Gulag Archipelago was written expressly for Soviet readers. Again and again the author says, in effect: We thought the Moscow purges of 1937 were more or less isolated convulsions of terror. Not so. The corruption of Soviet justice did not begin with Stalin as we were taught, but with Lenin, in 1918. Then he goes back to document the successive waves of political prisoners-from engineer "wreckers" of the Revolution and peasants caught up in collectivization right down to whole divisions of Red Army soldiers captured by the Germans in World War II and then returned to the U.S.S.R...
What kind of shock such a book must be for the Russians who manage to read it is difficult to imagine. For some, Stalin is still a hero. To most, Lenin is close to a political saint. Westerners -courtesy of cold war propaganda, a free press and honest scholarship-regard both men with varying degrees of repugnance. Even to them, much of the cruelty and stupidity will seem dreadful enough. Solzhenitsyn produces moments that are unbearable, breaking through all defenses that the mid-20th century reader is likely to have raised against being afflicted by the pain of others...