Word: unpersonable
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...actions," observes British Sovietologist Robert Conquest, "one saw a limited but not hidebound mind, and with it a sort of peasant cunning. But in the end, he antagonized his subordinates without sufficiently terrorizing them, a fatal lapse." Khrushchev died in official disgrace, reduced by the Soviet monolith to an unperson. To Russia's masses, his performance was at best ambiguous. Heralded for relaxing the prison-camp atmosphere that prevailed under Stalin, he was also bitterly blamed for recurring failures in the economy and agriculture. To most Westerners, too, his record is mixed. A shrewd man who carefully preserved...
Parasite Power. Despite his Orwellian unperson status, Biermann continues to turn out songs and poems. He lampoons the Bilroelephanten (bureaucratic elephants), who quake in fear before his guitar, or pokes fun at the effects of the Wall on East Germans ("When I die, I'll become a guard and patrol the border between heaven and hell. Show your pass, please.") In Der Dra-Dra, he attacks what he describes as "parasitic power of all sorts"-which suggests Franco and Papadopoulos as well as Ulbricht and Brezhnev...
...Russian embassy to learn of Dubček's dismissal. Late last week a far heavier blow fell on Dubček. The Central Committee expelled him from his 32-year membership in the Communist Party, an act that relegated him to the limbo status of an unperson...
...Literary Unperson. The local union expelled him anyhow, and last week the executive committee of the Russian Writers Union in Moscow confirmed the expulsion order. As a result, Solzhenitsyn has become an unperson in the Soviet literary community. He is deprived of all the perquisites of union membership, including loans for needy writers, the use of vacation retreats, and freedom to establish residence anywhere in the Soviet Union...
Babel's unpublished manuscripts were seized, and are presumed to have been destroyed during World War II. His books disappeared from the shops, and his name was stricken from The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia. He became an Orwellian unperson. Whether Babel was shot immediately after a sham trial or died in a forced-labor camp has never been known with any certainty. After Khrushchev "rehabilitated" Babel's name in 1954, the family received only a certificate giving an official death date of March...