Word: stalins
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...World War II, Joseph Stalin's personal movie library expanded. His army liberated Joseph Goebbels' film collection. On movie nights in the old winter garden of the Great Kremlin Palace, Stalin and his gang (a revolving cast of Bolshevik thugs and survivors) would watch Charlie Chaplin or Spencer Tracy or Clark Gable. Stalin particularly liked gangster and cowboy films; sexual content offended...
...Stalin--tyrant and village primitive--yammered all through the double feature, talking down the stars onscreen. At about 2 a.m. he would propose, as if spontaneously, "Let's go and get something to eat." No one said no. Everyone would ride 10 miles to Stalin's dacha at Kuntsevo and begin another of the booze-fogged, terror-soaked marathon predawn dinners that the Minister of Cultural Terror, Yury Zhdanov, had convinced Stalin were the equivalent of the symposia of the ancient Greeks. "These vomit-flecked routs," the British biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore observes in Stalin: The Court...
...captive boyars of the Politburo discussed literature, made policy, denounced colleagues and drank like fish to numb the fear of being led away at dawn. Often, Montefiore records, the dinner "sank to the level of a Neanderthal stag night." Stalin would get so drunk, Nikita Khrushchev remembered, that "he'd throw a tomato at you." Lavrenti Beria liked to slip tomatoes into the old Bolshevik Anastas Mikoyan's suit pockets and push Mikoyan against a wall so that they exploded...
Judging from the content of popular culture, one can safely say that if Harry had chosen to sport the hammer and the sickle of Stalin, Beria and Dzerzhinsky instead of the swastika of Hitler, Göring and Goebbels he would have attracted little notice. The widespread popularity of Che, Castro, Lenin, CCCP or Marx t-shirts, and the frequent usage of the Soviet five-pointed star or the crossed hammer and sickle, are only the most obvious examples of the curious double standard between our views on Nazism and Soviet Communism. Harvard’s own beloved...
...depraved, bloodthirsty and merciless as anything propagated by Hitler’s Third Reich. The lack of outrage over the continued usage of Soviet images is disturbing, because it suggests a shocking lack of historical perspective. While few are prepared to say it, the Russia that Lenin and Stalin forged in the blood of millions of nameless peasants was as evil a system as humans have yet constructed: it would behoove us to remember what happened in Soviet Russia as assuredly as we remember what happened in Nazi Germany...