Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Repentance is set in Georgia, the southern republic that was home to both Stalin and his dreaded secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria. Stalin never appears in the movie, but the main character, a local tyrant, is easily recognizable as Beria. Under his rule, people are arbitrarily arrested and then disappear. In one flashback, a woman searching for news of her missing husband hears about a delivery of logs carved with the names and addresses of prisoners. The woman searches in vain for her husband's name. Nearby another woman finds her loved one's name and caresses...
...threatened with incarceration in a mental hospital -- a not uncommon fate of Soviet dissidents. The film ends with the woman's awakening to find it was all a dream. Repentance is exceptional because it is the first Soviet film to deal with Beria and the horrors associated with the Stalin...
...adventure stories and children's books, as well as the 1978 novel Heavy Sand, about Soviet Jews' persecution by the Nazis during World War II. He describes his new work, which is set in the year 1934, as a "group portrait" of his own generation at a time when Stalin was consolidating power before the Great Terror. In the manner of Tolstoy's War and Peace, the novel mixes fact and fiction, historical figures and imaginary ones. Most important, it contains a "full portrait of the man" Stalin, Rybakov told the New York Times, "multifaceted as he was, including...
...mobilization of the masses; its total control of social life (all independent "intermediate" structures -- such as churches, parties, unions -- standing between the individual and the state were to be eradicated); and its systematic use of terror to enforce that control. Totalitarian regimes were thought to be (under Hitler and Stalin they certainly were) energetic, enthusiastic in an almost religious sense, on the march. Orwell's 1984 was not a parody. It was a mild extrapolation of totalitarian reality and a clinical picture of the totalitarian ideal...
...repressed "jazz section" of the musicians union in Czechoslovakia. Of course, some regimes are more total than others. For every Hungary there is a Rumania, where typewriters must be registered with the police. For every Poland, a North Korea, where the leader's cult of personality makes Stalin look retiring...