Word: stalinized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Mandelstam was to die in one of Stalin's Siberian prison camps at the beginning of World War II. He was one of Russia's finest modern poets, an artist who built his poems from gritty blocks of life. Anna Akhmatova, a close friend of the Mandelstams, shared this politically hazardous aesthetic. When she died in 1966 at the age of 77, she was regarded as Russia's greatest woman poet. It is a distinction that today might be considered sexist, were this issue not overshadowed by the enormous struggle in the Soviet Union for intellectual...
Joining Russia's "inner immigration" of outcast writers and thinkers, Akhmatova lived during the '20s and '30s by translating and scholarship. Stalin's purges, which saw the jailing of her own 20-year-old son, sent her into a new creative cycle. The poems of this period scarcely disguised her bitterness. Shah of the Shahs,/ blessed in Allah's eyes,/ how well did you feast?/ You hold the world in your hand/ as if it were a cold bright bead . . ./ But what about my boy,/ did you enjoy his taste? Although the poem was titled...
...irony of World War II was that it brought many Russians a small degree of freedom. Stalin entreated his "brothers and sisters" to unite in defending the motherland. Pravda even printed one of Akhmatova's heroic war poems. Her dormant fame was reawakened. In 1944 she received a standing ovation after reading her poetry from a Moscow stage. But two years later, with the war won, Stalin was asking. "Who organized this standing ovation?" Akhmatova was proscribed again and her son was rearrested...
Others were not so much amused as appalled. "I suppose Hitler and Stalin may have had such lists," said Arthur Schlesinger Jr., "but no American President. Nixon saw himself as being above the law, and those under him acted accordingly." Democratic Congressman John Brademas of Indiana agreed. "The secret plan to use federal money and federal power to harass critics is further evidence of the contempt for law and common decency that has characterized the Nixon White House. The real 'enemies' Americans must fear are those who would subvert the rule of law and the institutions of freedom...
...with President Nikolai Podgorny and Premier Kosygin, he has handled the show alone. In a major Politburo shake-up in April, he dispatched two of the strongest opponents of his policies. His official job - General Secretary of the Communist Party - does not entitle him to so much prominence. (Unlike Stalin and Khrushchev, he is not also the head of state.) Acknowledging the problem, the Soviets have responded by building up his status in the press to a degree that recalls the cult-of-personality...