Word: unperson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...heroes and elder statesmen. The Soviet Union has no such tradition. The top leaders there either die on the job like Lenin and Stalin, or are ousted and relegated, like Georgi Malenkov, to diplomatic exile, or, like Nikita Khrushchev, to virtual house arrest and the ignominy of being an unperson. Since Khrushchev's overthrow in 1964, only two higher-echelon Soviet leaders have retired because of age: Anastas Mikoyan and Nikolai Shvernik. Numerous others-including the dynamic opportunist Alexander Shelepin, the Ukrainian strongman Pyotr Shelest and the moderate reformer Gennady Voronov-have been expelled from the Politburo and denounced...
...might be interested to see how an airbrush can be used to render even an Empress an unperson...
...patriotism. To silence him, the government revoked his passport, branded him a subversive, and in effect forced him to leave the U.S. in order to gain employment. In short, the workings of American democracy were such that an internationally known artist and political activist was turned into an unperson in his own country...
...look in the early years of the post-Stalin era. For more than a decade, he was a member of the Soviet Union's ruling elite. Yet by the time he died last week at age 79 after a long illness, Nikolai Alexandrovich Bulganin had become an unperson in his homeland, an ignored and forgotten figure who in his last years idled away his time strolling along Moscow's boulevards and watching chess games in the park. Izvestia devoted only a paragraph to his obituary and no officials attended the perfunctory 30-minute funeral service...
...book's best chapter, "View of an Unperson," Fest explores the ways in which Hitler's own mesmerizing public spectacles-especially the death-heavy memorials to Nazi martyrs -were grand variations of the Wagner operas he admired so much. Indeed, concludes Fest, Hitler was neurotically fearful about being caught offstage-or off guard: he covered his mouth when he laughed. "He had scarcely any but staged relationships," writes Fest. "Everyone was either an extra or an instrument...