Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Vishnevskaya joined the Bolshoi Theater in 1952 when Stalin still acted as the opera's imperial patron. Millions of rubles were spent on the opulent sets and costumes for spectacles like Prince Igor and Boris Godunov. Seated in a heavily guarded box, Stalin reveled in the gilt-and-rhinestone production numbers as he munched on hard-boiled eggs. He had no knowledge of music. Once at an intermission he summoned to his loge the distinguished Bolshoi conductor Samuil Samosud and told him strongly that the performance "is lacking flats." Samosud had the wit to reply: "Good, Comrade Stalin. Thank...
...book's most affecting passages concern the tortured destiny of Shostakovich, whose servility to the Soviet authorities Vishnevskaya defends with the ferocity of friendship. She was not old enough in 1936 to understand the humiliation heaped on the composer when Stalin took exception to his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. But she was witness in 1965 to the drastic changes Shostakovich made in the score and libretto when a movie, renamed Katerina Izmailova, was made of his musical drama. Soviet censors lagged behind their American counterparts where sex was concerned. Vishnevskaya's account of the filming...
Roosevelt wants to reinforce the shaky new alliance by holding his own meeting with Stalin-or UJ. for Uncle Joe, as he and Churchill now call the dictator-because, as Roosevelt very bluntly puts it, "Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better." Roosevelt artfully tries to avoid a preliminary meeting with the truculent Churchill: "I do not want to give Stalin the impression that we are settling everything between ourselves before we meet him." But that is exactly what Churchill insists on: "It is grand of you to come and I will...
Thus occurs the Casablanca conference, the fourth of their eleven wartime meetings. Here Churchill gets his way, persuading Roosevelt to pursue a "Mediterranean strategy" of invading Italy rather than France, to Stalin's fury. But Churchill also begins to see how U.S. power is overtaking that of Britain. At one point he hopes that "our numbers justify increased representation for us in the high command." At another, he describes himself to Roosevelt, a little ruefully, as "your lieutenant...
...British empire fades, the chief empire builder becomes Uncle Joe, and the focal point of controversy becomes Poland. Churchill has backed one Polish exile "government" and Stalin another. Now, with the Red Army sweeping across Eastern Europe, Stalin demands and then seizes total power for his puppets. Churchill's protests go for nothing. Roosevelt, weary unto death ever since the Yalta conference early in 1945, remains all too characteristically hopeful. "I would minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible," he says in one of his last messages to Churchill, on April 11, 1945, "because these problems...