Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...anyone was inclined to criticize this failure, or the costly palliative of buying grain from the West, Khrushchev had the standard answer: remember how bad things were under Stalin. In 1947, to earn foreign exchange, Stalin and Molotov actually sold grain abroad while in a number of areas "people had bloated stomachs or even died from lack of food." It was the first time Moscow had admitted that starvation took place in the Soviet Union since the forced collectivization of the early 1930s...
Probably the most startling book to come out of Russia in recent years was Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In massively compelling detail, it described the blighted existence of a prisoner in one of Stalin's detention camps at a time when the Soviet government had barely got around to admitting their existence. But Solzhenitsyn had spent eight years in just such a camp. And a question arose-was it impressive merely because it was autobiographically true? Now Solzhenitsyn's second book-a pair of short novels-has appeared. Even...
...cynical power structure of the Soviet world. In the '30s, when he volunteered to go to Spain, the authorities regarded him as some kind of nut and sent him back to the university. He is troubled because the war is not following the victorious blueprint that Joseph Stalin always said it would. His only solace is reading Das Kapital. "The worse the news from the war became," writes Solzhenitsyn, "the more he buried himself in this thick blue book...
...marks." But the reader is mistaken who thinks he is listening in on James Dean complaining to Dad because he can't have the family car for a double date. Seryosha's father has been taken away by the NKVD, and the boy has encountered in Joseph Stalin and the local commissar a pair of fa ther images worthy of hate...
With flashbacks, brief jagged confrontations, and dirty language - all of them daring deviations from stodgy stylistic norms in Stalin's time - Maximov tells how the rebellious Seryosha lives as an outlaw on the seamy side of the Soviet establishment, first stealing vegetables to sell on the black market, then working for a smuggler plying the border trade back and forth from Turkey. Eventually he is drafted to fight in World...