Word: commissar
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Yang turned to the 27th Army, normally based in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, and largely composed of ill-educated peasant conscripts with no ties to Beijing, for the harsh job of clearing Tiananmen. The President has personal links to the 27th through his brother Yang Baibing, who is top political commissar of the P.L.A., and Chief of Staff Chi Haotian, said to be another relative...
...Paradjanov, a lyric poet in the Dovzhenko mold, spent nearly four years in prison. Andrei Tarkovsky, the greatest Soviet director since Eisenstein, filmed Andrei Rublev in 1966; the complete version was not shown publicly in the U.S.S.R. until 1987, just after Tarkovsky died in exile. Alexander Askoldov's The Commissar, filmed in 1967, was accused of "Zionist tendencies" and suppressed for 20 years; Askoldov has yet to make another movie. Erakli Kvirikadze made his satire of Stalinism, The Swimmer, in 1981, but a crucial scene was deleted until 1987. The director stashed the offending footage in his refrigerator and waited...
...saying, without Stalin there would have been no intimate, brooding string quartets, no enigmatic, valedictory Fifteenth Symphony. By giving Shostakovich something to hate and fear, Stalin turned him into a great composer. The symphonies dedicated to the state and the choral potboilers like The Vow of the People's Commissar were a small price...
...COMMISSAR. The liberation of this long-banned Soviet-made parable about a pregnant army officer is glasnost's greatest gift to movies...
...COMMISSAR. A tough officer of the Soviet army gets pregnant and, in the company of a Jewish family, finds humanity. Banned for 20 years, this Soviet- made parable is glasnost's greatest gift to movies...