Word: classing
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...social stratification that exists in the Soviet Union obviously conflicts with the ideal of equality, which Marx called "the groundwork of Communism." Such an inconsistency was denounced by Yugoslav Dissident Milovan Djilas in his 1957 classic The New Class, and elitism ranks high among the ideological sins for which the Chinese condemn the Soviets. Soviet theorists inscrutably justify such inequality as a "non-antagonistic contradiction." Others, including some Marxist dissidents, claim that the system has not really created an elite class, since political power and its direct perquisites cannot be inherited. But there is one flaw in that argument...
Still, Soviet women are second-class comrades. Top jobs have a way of going to men. In medicine, a profession with much less prestige in the Soviet Union than in the West, virtually all the elite surgeons and administrators are male. Mathematics and the sciences are masculine preserves. Though a third of the Supreme Soviet and 25% of Communist Party members are women, none occupy positions of real power, including membership in the Politburo. Even in what are considered traditionally female professions -education, health, post office, telephone and telegraph operations, and shopkeeping-the majority of managers and decision makers...
...social order of exploiters." Heaven? It distracts people from "the real tasks of the Communist rearrangement of life on earth." Conversely, hell dampens "the rage of the working people against their oppressors by planting a hope that the latter will be punished after death." Easter fosters "ideas of a class peace and forgiveness." Christ's love-thy-neighbor teaching is "egotistical and antihumane...
...word is not all negative, however. Atheism, readers learn, expresses the interests and aspirations of the working class and "serves the cause of spiritual liberation of the working masses from the burden of prejudices and delusions of the past...
...about a teacher-translator trying to balance the requirements of his overextended double career with the equally pressing demands of a suspicious wife and a possessive mistress-a situation familiar to members of the Western bourgeoisie. The movie offers an agreeable insight into the life of the educated, privileged class in the Soviet Union...