Word: stalinized
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...power and substance of Solzhenitsyn's condemnation seemed likely to bring down the Kremlin's wrath on the already beleaguered author (see BOOKS). In contrast to his novels One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Cancer Ward and The First Circle, which dealt only with Stalin's terror, Gulag strikes out at the officially idolized figure of Lenin. Solzhenitsyn rejects the Kremlin's thesis that Stalin alone was responsible for the "excesses" of his time. Instead, Solzhenitsyn devastatingly demonstrates that the imprisonment of millions under Stalin was made possible by Lenin's establishment...
Gulag also recounts the better-known horrors of the Stalin era while adding some sensational disclosures and intimations. Solzhenitsyn suggests, for example, that Stalin was an undercover agent of the Okhrana (the Czarist secret police) in the disguise of a Bolshevik revolutionary-thus reinforcing the suspicions of several Western scholars. Gulag also says that Stalin planned a large-scale "massacre" of Jews that was thwarted by his death in 1953. In that year the arrest of several Jewish physicians, accused of plotting to assassinate high government officials, unleashed a wave of antiSemitism...
Writes Solzhenitsyn: "According to Moscow rumors, Stalin's plan was this: at the beginning of March, 1953, the 'doctor-murderers' were to be hanged on Red Square. Aroused patriots, naturally led by instructors, were to rush off to in cite an anti-Jewish pogrom. And at this point . . . the government would intervene generously to save the Jews from the wrath of the people. On that very same night it would remove them from Moscow to the Far East and Siberia, where barracks were already prepared for them...
...Soviet regime has exceeded imperial rule by factors ranging from 10 to 1 to 1,000 to 1. Solzhenitsyn also asserts that the Soviets killed and imprisoned far more people than the Nazis did, excluding wartime casualties on both sides. He estimates that in any one year of the Stalin era, 12,000,000 people were held in prison. "As some departed beneath the sod," he adds, "the 'machine' kept bringing in replacements." He eloquently calls for punishment of all those responsible for such 'crimes against the Soviet people, noting that post-Hitler Germany has convicted more...
Some of The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin is undeniably opaque, irritating, pretentious and self-indulgent. Few playwrights would have the nerve to stitch together a dramatic conglomerate as Wilson has done, containing portions of his previous works such as The King of Spain, The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud and Deafman Glance. But considering its sprawling length, Stalin is remarkably free from boredom. This is a token of its visual mesmerism and incessant variety. One moment the stern, noble mien of the aged Sigmund Freud will appear as he walks about the stage on his wife...