Word: stalins
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There was no mistaking the mustachioed figure with pipe in hand. Illuminated by a brilliant spotlight, Joseph Stalin had come to life onstage in a local theater production of Anatoli Rybakov's groundbreaking novel about Stalinist- era repression, Children of the Arbat. When Stalin stepped forward to deliver his monologue, a chilling silence enveloped the auditorium of the Lunacharsky Dramatic Theater. "It takes great cruelty to tap the great energy of a backward people," declaimed the provincial tyrant. "A dictator is great who can inspire love for himself through terror...
This may have seemed quite normal for John, but it was evidence for me that people no longer lived here the way they used to. Stalin began the practice of giving privileges to the leadership: special foods, dachas fenced off from those belonging to ordinary mortals, apartments in the best-built houses. Brezhnev expanded these privileges. How many hunting and fishing "lodges" were built and furnished with Finnish furniture and rugs so thick you could tumble into them up to your waist! This inequality in a society declaring equality caused great indignation...
...beginning to yield to free debate. Like America's system of local school boards, councils made up of trade-union and party members, parents and students have been created to give people more control over their children's classrooms. Boring textbooks that only timidly touched upon the terrors of Stalin have been withdrawn. Until new textbooks become available, articles from newspapers, enlivened by the candor of glasnost, serve as the main basis for history lessons. Once banned 20th century classics, such as Andrei Platonov's Juvenile Sea, have found their way into classrooms...
Seen again from the air, Moscow is unchanged. The city squats as always on the steppes like an ungainly old hulk, beached and abandoned, its Stalin-era spires so many masts thrusting into the gloom, and the nearest sea hundreds of miles away. Fair warning, neo-Napoleons! Even with glasnost, perestroika and the Pepsi Revolution, Moscow the impregnable lives on, isolated and forbidding, a dour reminder of what it means to be Russian...
...ground it is much the same at first. Behind the hard eyes of a young passport officer lurk the ghosts of his country's history: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Lenin, Stalin and all those they once ruled, the entire tragic parade of persecutors and persecuted. And when the officer finally grunts his assent and one is readmitted to the Soviet sanctum, one still imagines great steel doors clanging shut...