Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Consider Chernobyl. Had this misfortune occurred in the Stalin era, I am sure that our press would have immediately hinted at the possibility of an American conspiracy. That was the case in the early postwar years when a poor harvest in the Ukraine was blamed on Americans who supposedly conspired to put Colorado beetles into the fields. But our press did not make a secret of Chernobyl. Those responsible for the tragedy have been identified. Chernobyl has been opened to foreigners, including the American Dr. Robert Gale...
...demanded that he be thrown out of the country. They called him a "pig rooting in our Soviet garden." Today Historian Dmitri Likhachev in a Literaturnaya Gazeta article unequivocally demands that Doctor Zhivago be published. Today our literary journals are preparing important books for publication: Vladimir Dudintsev writing about Stalin's suppression of genetics; Anatoli Pristavkin on the forced resettlement of ethnic Chechens from the Caucasus; Anatoli Rybakov on the assassination of Sergei Kirov. All these subjects were banned in the past...
...began with an instructive story. I will end with another. In 1966 the Soviet Union experienced its first great dissident event of the post-Stalin era -- the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, writers whose books were published in the West under the pen names Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak. Somebody had revealed their real names, and they were immediately arrested on orders of then KGB Chief Vladimir Semichastny. I was one of the Soviet writers who protested that trial...
...themes, best understood by people who know its plot well. Raskolnikov (Randle Mell) harps on the quasi-Nietzschean idea that conquerors absolve themselves of sin by the very act of conquest. He repeatedly urges himself to be a Napoleon -- which, Lyubimov acknowledges, Soviet audiences often took to mean a Stalin. These philosophical monologues, however, are kept brief. Lyubimov relies heavily on ritual and brief blackout skits that verge on surreal slapstick; he creates a milieu more than he mounts a debate. Like a cinematic montage, the story jumps from Raskolnikov to his family, his destitute neighbors, a deranged friend caught...
...contemplates the enormous challenges before her, Aquino can take heart, perhaps, from her rare gift for surprise. Stalin is said to have claimed that "you can't make a revolution with silk gloves." Edward Bulwer- Lytton, the British 19th century novelist, believed that "revolutions are not made with rose water." And Oliver Wendell Holmes pronounced that "revolutions are not made by men in spectacles." In coming to power on a wing and a prayer, Aquino has already disproved them...