Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, Tenor Nicolai Gedda, Bass Dimiter Petkov, Ambrosian Opera Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Mstislav Rostropovich conductor, Angel; 3 LPs). Soviet critics thought they heard a masterpiece when this, Shostakovich's second opera, was premiered in 1934. Then Stalin walked out of a performance and they listened again. This time they heard "din, gnash and screech" (Pravda). The work was withdrawn, and Shostakovich pursued more orthodox ways. A sanitized version, unveiled in 1963, found its way to the West on records, but this is the first recording of the original score. Harsh, erotic...
Every nation has thousands of people with more or less hidden sadistic instincts. They are eagerly used by various dictators (Hitler's Gestapo, Stalin's NKVD, the Shah's SAVAK, Pinochet's DINA, etc.) and carry out their new duties with sadistic pleasure. Some of them may happen to be M.D.s...
...will read the list." Brezhnev then took Byrd's arm and gave him a tour of the grounds, taking him up the hill some 200 yards to a small cabin. This was a retreat that Stalin had built but had never used, said Brezhnev...
...repression had begun. In Stalin's slow and terrible eye, such art was decadent and, because of its internationalism, bourgeois-formalist. The Gulag swallowed some artists, like Boris Kushner. Others, such as Larionov, Goncharova, Gabo and Ivan Puni, went into exile. Those who stayed, like Rodchenko or the architect Konstantin Melnikov, survived as ghosts, forgotten men in a culture of vindictive Stalinist toadies. Like Cronus, the Revolution devoured its children. As a wholesale trashing of a civilization, only Hitler's demolition of the German modernists compares with it. Inside the Soviet Union, the works themselves lay buried, invisible...
...forgotten nothing, British Historian Ronald Fraser records the memories of survivors. He digs for the truth about Communist betrayals and fascist atrocities, executioners and victims. Many of the recollections are as sanguinary as the war: bombs strike a hospital, airplanes strafe civilians, firing squads are everywhere. Hitler and Stalin control the moves offstage, ever willing to sacrifice Spaniards to German and Soviet causes. Contradiction is the order of the day: "How do you explain that?" inquires a woman. "?Dios mio! The people who destroy holy images kiss them." On the left, a father and son have their own civil...