Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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According to the dogma of Socialist Realism, all art and literature must conform to the triple standard of partinost (party character), ideinost (socialist content) and narodnost (closeness to the people). For Stalin, this ideal was most faithfully reflected in the work of his favorite painter, Alexander Gerasimov, whose portraits of the dictator in various noble poses hung in museums, offices, factories and homes everywhere. At the same time, in the '30s and '40s, Stalin used every kind of coercion to apply the Socialist Realism doctrine, destroying the avant-garde and the contacts with Western artists that it needed...
...religious influence in schools. Intense atheism campaigns in the 1920s and '30s led to the imprisonment and death of thousands of priests and the desecration of countless churches. In the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, workers boasted that they burned 20,000 icons in socialist competition. By 1939, when Stalin signed his pact with Hitler, the Russian Orthodox Church had only 100 or so churches open throughout the Soviet Union, compared with 40,437 before the Revolution...
...Hitler violated the pact, and his mechanized divisions drove deep into the Soviet Union. The all-but-crushed church called upon the faithful to defend Mother Russia and quickly raised 300 million rubles for the Red Army. In desperate need of a spiritual force that could bolster national solidarity, Stalin allowed the church more freedom. Since then, except for a strong antireligious period in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the church's right to peaceful coexistence with atheism has not been seriously threatened...
...result has been a heavy demand for attorneys. The number of law schools has risen from 36 to 50 since 1970, and an unprecedented measure of prestige is accruing to the profession. Some observers have even suggested something that Marx, Lenin or Stalin would have found unthinkable: in 30 years or so, the country's Establishment could include a liberal sprinkling of lawyers...
...young film maker-theoreticians-Sergei Eisenstein, V.I. Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko-seized the movie toy and remade it into a sophisticated machine that dazzled the world intelligentsia, even as it instructed the Russian proletariat. As long as the party hierarchy was amused too, all was well. But in 1924 Stalin rephrased the famous dictum, and his diaphanous threat holds to this day: "The cinema is the greatest means of mass agitation. Our problem is to take this matter into our own hands...