Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...caused quite a stir by publishing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch the first novel of an obscure mathematics teacher and former Red Army officer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Released with the express permission of Premier Khrushchev, One Day is a powerful, often humorous account of life in Stalin's forced labor camps. Translator Max Hayward, among others, hailed the novel as a "literary masterpiece" when it was published in the West several months later...
...principle importance of the novel, however, is political and not literary. Soviet authorities no longer deny the existence of slave labor camps under Stalin; but never before has the regime allowed publication of such a brutally detailed description of that chapter in Soviet history...
Thus giving permission to publish One Day must be seen as a purely political decision by the regime. First of all the novel serves the cause of anti-Stalinism, and concomitantly the cause of Stalin's denunciator Khrushchev. As the editor of Novy Mir wrote in a preface to the original publication, "Only by going into its consequences fully, courageously, and truthfully can we guarantee a complete and irrevocable break with all those things that cast a shadow over the past...
...tiny Albania, seizing any excuse to defy the Soviets, was gushing Stalin's praise. All over the country, monuments to the dead dictator were hung with garlands of flowers; Tirana newspapers published his picture and babbled their "love and profound respect for his teachings," Red China might also have been expected, to use the occasion to glorify Stalin's memory, but remembering the dictator's open distrust of his Asian comrades, Peking chose not to be hypocritical...
Moscow did not shout back last week; but it could not long remain silent, lest Khrushchev appear to be the "coward" that Mao now called him. Now that the Chinese Reds have nailed their theses tothe Kremlin wall, some men in Moscow would be thinking of excommunication. Stalin's posthumous excommunication took only three years to accomplish; and already the Sino-Soviet quarrel has raged for longer than that...