Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Nikita is obviously convinced that only its vastly increased use can raise production enough to avoid drastic food cuts or permanent dependence on expensive foreign farm products, such as the 11 million tons of wheat the Soviets are buying from the West. Asks a current Moscow joke: "What was Stalin's last mistake?" Answer: "He stockpiled enough grain for only ten years...
Whenever Joseph Stalin saw an opera that wasn't Eugene Onegin he went home mad, but rarely as mad as he was the night he saw Dmitry Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. "Gnashing and screeching, crude, primitive, vulgar," Pravda roared, having prudently reconsidered a published opinion that called the opera "a triumph" after its 1934 debut two years before. Shostakovich withdrew the opera, and off and on over the years, he set to work at revision...
...Soviet cinema. Director Grigori Chukhrai, who proved his talent with the sensitive, romanticized Ballad of a Soldier, tells a tale of illicit love-and tells it straight, without prudish apologies, against a background of post-World War II political tyranny. The off-screen villain of the piece is Joseph Stalin...
...Then Stalin dies. Spring is nigh, and the screen bursts with the flux of a great thaw. Glaciers move. Oppressive ice masses give way to a life-giving socialist sun, and quick as a wink all Russia is awash with sentiment. Such devices sweep Clear Skies right to the edge of a slushy cinematic wasteland. Trick effects multiply with stultifying regularity. The camera, scudding skyward, frequently pauses to record the emotional temperature, ranging from before-the-storm to lo-the-dawn...
Died. Admiral William Harrison Standley, 90, chief of U.S. naval operations from 1933 to 1937, wartime Ambassador to the Soviet Union, where he kept lend-lease flowing while pressing Stalin to tell the Russian people about U.S. efforts on their behalf, grew so disgusted that after the war he campaigned against the Communists with such fervor that in 1959 he bitterly protested when San Diego used a red Christmas star atop a civic center; of pneumonia; in San Diego...