Word: stalinism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Many Western experts have been speculating that when the time came for a crackdown, Gorbachev would lead it. While he is a relatively benevolent dictator -- more Peter the Great than Stalin -- and his powers to rule by decree have been handed to him legally, he remains a dictator. His idea of democracy is a reasonable amount of public debate and a limited devolution of authority to the republics, but a clear concentration of power at the center...
...order to make rubber moldings of the bells, which they brought back to Russia and used to make the casts for the replacements. The original bells came to Lowell in 1930, when American industrialist Charles R. Crane donated them to the University. He had purchased them in Russia, where Stalin was closing all of the churches and melting their bells for raw materials. The Danilov Monastery, the bells’ original home, was spared destruction and served as an orphanage for children of dissidents. The monastery reopened in 1988 and began negotiations with the University in December...
...does anyone remember when Mother Teresa died? The greatest saint of our time died on the frenzied eve of the funeral of the greatest diva of our time, Princess Di. In the popular mind, celebrity trumps virtue every time. And consider Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev, tormented in life by Stalin, his patron and jailer. Prokofiev had the extraordinary bad luck of dying on the same day as the great man, "ensconcing him forever in the tyrant's shadow," wrote critic Sarah Kaufman of the Washington Post, "where he remains branded as a compromised artist...
...there always redemption in reconciliation? What about justice? Some crimes seem too monstrous for absolution. Even today, it's a brave soul who argues that Hitler should be forgiven the Holocaust, Stalin his purges or Mao his Great Leap Forward. Were justice and reckoning not cheated by the deaths of Milosevic and Pinochet? What about more recent atrocities? On Feb. 27, prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in the Hague presented evidence that a Sudanese government minister and a militia leader were allegedly responsible for war crimes committed in Darfur in 2003 and 2004. When wounds are so fresh...
...author of Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance. Increasingly, it's choreographers like Ratmansky who are taking their place as ballet's headliners. In one of Ratmansky's most celebrated moves, for example, in 2003 he restaged Bright Stream, the full-length ballet by radical Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, which Stalin banned shortly after it premiered in Moscow in 1936. Ratmansky looks forward, too: his own creation, Go for Broke, features modern steps and bright yellow unitards, marking quite a departure from the traditional tutus and pink leotards of Cinderellas past. "You can't call any choreography that's done today...