Word: stalins
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...this painting reveals something of it. It is a typical tale of our times." The portrait depicts a stern yet handsome man in the uniform of a high-ranking communist official of the prewar years. He had been a Bolshevik revolutionary, says Zatonsky. But he differed politically with Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union's early years. He was arrested in 1937 and called "an enemy of the people." He was summarily shot, one of more than a million to be executed in the Great Purge of 1936 to 1938. Zatonsky's mother was sent to the Gulag. His sister...
...daughter Lena, also a school teacher, was born after Stalin died, in November 1953. Of the celebrations of World War II, she says she has no special feelings of pride. "What I remember most about the war is the movies," she says. "They were dozens of World War II movies, but they were so blatantly propagandistic. All the Nazis were portrayed as idiots, and the Soviets as great heroes. We had a phrase, kino nemetskoe, which is slang for a show so ridiculous you cannot believe it." Of the time after the war she says, "It was stable...
...recalls. "I can't say we always had bread, but we lived. We all had ideals, and we all worked toward some purpose." Now, "the only thing people work for is money," he notes. "Something has been lost." Like most of his era, Evdokimov has little to say of Stalin and the terror. "Maybe some of the parents of my friends were dealt a blow by Stalin," he says. "But it was rude to talk about...
...agree with them, but their arguments are at least understandable. Suppose you are a patriotic Russian in your 60s. Your childhood was passed amid the horrors and suffering of the Great Patriotic War, in which millions died to defend the Motherland against Nazism. Then you survived Stalin, watched the utopian fantasies of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat go into sclerosis in the 1960s and '70s, and saw the imperium collapse in the '80s. Today the yellow arches of McDonald's shed their plastic gleam on Red Square, and gangsterism rules instead of socialist virtue. You know the Nazis inflicted incalculable...
...grasp what it means to be 120 years old, consider this: a woman in the U.S. now has a life expectancy of 79 years. Jeanne Calment of Arles, France, reached that advanced age back in 1954, when Eisenhower was in the White House and Stalin had just passed from the scene. Twenty-two years later, at age 100, Calment was still riding her bicycle around town, having outlived both her only child and grandchild. And 20 years after that, she was charming the photographers and reporters who arrived in droves last week, along with the French Minister of Health...