Word: stalins
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...publication of Testimony, the composer's memoirs secretly narrated to his friend, editor Solomon Volkov, a different picture emerged. This Shostakovich was a pragmatist, who learned to keep his head down after he was denounced in Pravda and saw his friends and colleagues persecuted and purged by Stalin during the Great Terror. This Shostakovich was a survivor, who saved his innermost feelings for his work. "Words are not my genre," he once said to Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose poem Babi Yar he set in the brutal Symphony No. 13. "I never lie in music...
...think you could say that President Roosevelt, Mr. Churchill and Mr. Stalin were starry-eyed idealists. They had been through the fire of war. Did anybody really think in 1945 that every government would renounce the use of force in its relations with every other government, and agree to settle all disputes with peaceful means, and disarm? This was the aim. The U.N. Charter was a great beacon set on a hill, the great light toward which we were supposed to be working. We haven't had World War III. I don't see any reason to be downhearted...
...their long-standing ties with Moscow, the Armenians have a detailed list of complaints against the Soviet state. Aside from the Nagorno-Karabakh issue, a special sore point has been bureaucratic insensitivity to the environment, as in the Baltic states. Ever since the Soviet Union under Stalin began to industrialize in the 1920s, Moscow has built the republic into a leading chemical-production center. One result is chronic air pollution. "The air is so bad, you can no longer see Mount Ararat," complains a Yerevan resident, referring to the snow-peaked 16,945-ft. mountain some 30 miles away across...
...Armenian organizations gain sophistication, popular resentment is growing at Moscow's apparent disdain for nationalist grievances. While accounts of Stalin's crimes have been splashed across the pages of leading Soviet newspapers, the Armenian crisis has virtually been ignored. Pravda has given only vague accounts of the Yerevan demonstrations; when articles have appeared, correspondents have condemned the protests as the work of "corrupt elements" and "extremists." Says Ter-Petrossian: "What we are doing is what Gorbachev says he wants: people participating in government decisions." Adds another Armenian who regularly attends the Theater Square meetings: "He should be proud...
...Moscow's role in skewing the republic's demography. During the industrialization drive of the 1960s and 1970s, the Kremlin sent huge numbers of non-Estonian workers to the region. As a result, Estonians now make up only 60% of the population. The influx has revived bitter memories of Stalin-era deportations, when tens of thousands of Estonians were branded as opponents of Soviet rule and deported to Siberia...