Word: stalinism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...publication of Testimony, the composer's memoirs secretly narrated to his friend, editor Solomon Volkov, a different picture emerged. This Shostakovich was a pragmatist, who learned to keep his head down after he was denounced in Pravda and saw his friends and colleagues persecuted and purged by Stalin during the Great Terror. This Shostakovich was a survivor, who saved his innermost feelings for his work. "Words are not my genre," he once said to Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose poem Babi Yar he set in the brutal Symphony No. 13. "I never lie in music...
...Rudkin's elegant screenplay, Shostakovich (Ben Kingsley) negotiates his artistic salvation through public acquiescence, gratefully accepting his humiliation at a 1948 Soviet Composers' Union meeting and ritualistically denouncing Stravinsky at a conference the next year in New York City. Always he is haunted by the doom- laden specter of Stalin (Terence Rigby), who is seen thumbing through dossiers while sitting by the telephone, dispatching his opponents to their graves simply by raising the handset from the cradle...
Palmer makes little pretense to literalism, preferring to relate the composer's spiritual odyssey through stark images. Shot mostly in gritty black and white, the film often turns phantasmagorical; near the end, the ghost of * Stalin appears to the dying composer and tells him, "I am the enemy you loved." For all Shostakovich's hatred of the dictator, Palmer seems to be 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...
...think you could say that President Roosevelt, Mr. Churchill and Mr. Stalin were starry-eyed idealists. They had been through the fire of war. Did anybody really think in 1945 that every government would renounce the use of force in its relations with every other government, and agree to settle all disputes with peaceful means, and disarm? This was the aim. The U.N. Charter was a great beacon set on a hill, the great light toward which we were supposed to be working. We haven't had World War III. I don't see any reason to be downhearted...
...Moscow's role in skewing the republic's demography. During the industrialization drive of the 1960s and 1970s, the Kremlin sent huge numbers of non-Estonian workers to the region. As a result, Estonians now make up only 60% of the population. The influx has revived bitter memories of Stalin-era deportations, when tens of thousands of Estonians were branded as opponents of Soviet rule and deported to Siberia...