Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Very rarely does a Soviet tell the agitatori that he or she does not intend to vote. In Stalin's time, not voting literally led to a midnight knock on the door and a one-way ticket to Siberia. Now there are no overt punishments, but a notation may be entered in the non-voter's police file...
...arduous and often tragic for Soviet exiles, particularly for those poets and writers who fled their country after the 1917 Revolution. A few, like Vladimir Nabokov, joined the mainstream of modern literature and enriched it. A handful returned in desperation to the Soviet Union, only to perish hi Stalin's camps, like the eminent critic Dmitri Mirsky, or by suicide, as in the case of the great idiosyncratic poet Marina Tsvetayeva. Many remained stranded on alien shores where their writing disappeared with scarcely a trace...
...Communism. By contrast, there are no hidden homilies in Aksyonov's multilevel, 230,000-word novel, The Burn, which Random House will publish later this year. A denser, darker work than The Island, The Burn reflects the author's searing experience as the child of victims of Stalin's great purges. It also powerfully evokes another subject proscribed in Soviet fiction since Stalin's day: sex. It is a fact of life made frightening and moving by Aksyonov...
...With threats, bluster and a deafness to the word no. De Gaulle cajoled enough weapons from the Allies to arm the Free French troops, 7,000 of whom had been recruited by midsummer 1940. When he felt that Churchill and Roossevelt were neglecting him, he courted Stalin and threatened to send French forces to the Soviet front. Shut out of the planning for Dday, he retaliated by creating his own civil administration for liberated France. In the end, the general extracted just about everything he wanted from the Allies, a feat that won him the enmity of F.D.R...
Chernenko's early attempts to establish himself as a writer on ideological subjects were hampered by his lack of erudition. It is said that Mikhail Suslov, the party's chief ideologue in the post-Stalin period, had a poor opinion of Chernenko's abilities and was reluctant to let him publish articles in Kommunist, the party's main ideological publication. But after Suslov's death, in January 1982, Chernenko wrote frequently for Kommunist on general Soviet policy, especially on relations between Moscow and the foreign Communist parties. His attitude toward culture and the arts was as conservative and as ideologically...