Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...CANCER WARD, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Soviet author uses a cancer ward as a metaphor for Communist society; the doomed patients reveal jagged, damning insights into the everyday enormities of life under Stalin. Not so successful a book as The First Circle, it is still a relentless narrative and a powerful, often poetic novel...
Dark Days. Kosterin had fought against more than one machine in his 72 years. He became a Bolshevik a year before the Russian Revolution in 1917 and was a party member in good standing until arrested in Stalin's widespread purges of the mid-1930s. Not long after he was released from a labor camp, after Stalin's death in 1953, his daughter Nina gained posthumous fame in the Soviet Union as Russia's Anne Frank. At the age of 20, she had been executed by the Nazis for her part in a partisan raid...
...intellectuals and artists attending Kosterin's funeral, he was the very symbol of uncompromising Leninism that was crushed mercilessly in Stalin's era-and is now imperiled again. Some brought wreaths bearing ribbons that read, "For his fight against Stalinism" and "From his comrades and friends in the prisons and camps." Grigorenko, an engineer whose libertarian views cost him his army rank in 1964, urged the mourners to work for "the persistent development of genuine Leninist democracy," and scathingly dismissed the current "totalitarianism that hides behind the mask of so-called Soviet democracy" as its antithesis...
...CANCER WARD, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Soviet author uses a cancer ward as a metaphor for Russian society; the doomed patients reveal jagged, damning insights into the everyday enormities of life under Stalin. Not quite so successful a book as The First Circle, it is still a relentless narrative and a powerful, often poetic novel...
Solzhenitsyn's relentless narrative, moreover, takes place early in Khrushchev's regime, when the Soviet Union was first beginning to admit, and partially mitigate, the crudest of Stalin's repressions. For metaphorically inclined readers, it is justifiable to observe that Oleg Kostoglotov, the author's rough-hewn hero, has his relief from cancer (as Solzhenitsyn himself did) in 1955, precisely when the U.S.S.R. was having its first remission of the disease of mass exile and imprisonment...