Word: stalinism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...beginning to yield to free debate. Like America's system of local school boards, councils made up of trade-union and party members, parents and students have been created to give people more control over their children's classrooms. Boring textbooks that only timidly touched upon the terrors of Stalin have been withdrawn. Until new textbooks become available, articles from newspapers, enlivened by the candor of glasnost, serve as the main basis for history lessons. Once banned 20th century classics, such as Andrei Platonov's Juvenile Sea, have found their way into classrooms...
Seen again from the air, Moscow is unchanged. The city squats as always on the steppes like an ungainly old hulk, beached and abandoned, its Stalin-era spires so many masts thrusting into the gloom, and the nearest sea hundreds of miles away. Fair warning, neo-Napoleons! Even with glasnost, perestroika and the Pepsi Revolution, Moscow the impregnable lives on, isolated and forbidding, a dour reminder of what it means to be Russian...
...ground it is much the same at first. Behind the hard eyes of a young passport officer lurk the ghosts of his country's history: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Lenin, Stalin and all those they once ruled, the entire tragic parade of persecutors and persecuted. And when the officer finally grunts his assent and one is readmitted to the Soviet sanctum, one still imagines great steel doors clanging shut...
Sharp memories of the brutal past were jogged as well by a new play, Four Interrogations, the story of an old woman unfairly charged under Stalin as an "enemy of the people." Before the curtain rises, the audience sits in darkness while voices screech Stalinist slogans over a loudspeaker. Then an imposing photo of Stalin is projected onto a black curtain. Finally, a spotlight sweeps over the audience, stopping now and then to hold first one person, then another and another in its sudden white glare...
...Ogonyok to decide to publish just a one- sentence reference to the need for public control over the Soviet military and the KGB. Now we publish everything that we can vouch for, which is how it should be. That is how Ogonyok's stories on the crimes of Stalin and modern corruption originated. That is how we examine such things as the decline of the Bolshoi Ballet, the rise of nonparty organizations in the Baltic republics, the problems of the poor and attempts to use anti-Semitism to restore a dictatorship of fear...