Stalinist Subjectivity

"Stalin performed his great turn-about in late 1927 and took over the left analysis" (Pereira, 5). This is interesting because Stalin had been on the

The Great Terror was one of the single greatest loss of lives in the history of the world. It was a crusade of political tyranny in the Soviet Union that transpired during the late 1930’s. The Terrors implicated a wide spread cleansing of the Communist Party and government officials, control of peasants and the Red Army headship, extensive police over watch, suspicion of saboteurs, counter-revolutionaries, and illogical slayings. Opportunely, some good did come from the terrors nonetheless. Two of those goods being Sofia Petrovna and Requiem. Both works allow history to peer back into the Stalin Era and bear witness to the travesties that came with it. Through the use of fictional story telling and thematic devises Sofia Petrovna and Requiem, respectively, paint a grim yet descriptive picture in a very efficient manner.

With that thought in mind, we are back to looking at how Arthur Koestler portrayed the character of Rubashov as a vehicle to illustrate the struggle between the ideas of the party and of the individual. The conspicuous disagreement of the Communist Party is the contention between

Throughout historical times, the rule of Josef Stalin has been questioned due to his position as being one of the most popular and contentious leaders. Through the evaluation of his ruling within the Soviet Union, he can be seen as both a positive and negative ruler. His methods of changing the country following World War I were sudden, causing a complete change in societal ways of life in controversial ways. While his changes created one of the most powerful countries the world had ever seen at its’ time, they also caused for massive discontent within the citizens of Soviet Russia.

In the book Sofia Petrovna, the author Lydia Chukovskaya writes about Sofia Petrovna and her dreadful experiences as a widowed mother during the Russian Stalinist Terror of the 1930s. There were four basic results of the Russian Stalinist Terror: first, it was a way of keeping people in order; second, it kept Stalin in power and stopped revolutions from forming, made people work harder to increase the output of the economy, and separated families as well as caused deaths of many innocent people due to false charges.

To begin with, this book educated the reader about the past. Everyone in the Soviet Union looked up to the leader, Stalin, even though he wasn’t a good leader at all. He caused many problems for the citizens including uncomfortable living conditions. This book educates the reader by showing that back then even when people were treated badly, they still had to look up to their leader even though he was the cause of all

Stalin like Hitler “used propaganda, censorship, and terror to force his will on the Soviet people. Government newspapers glorified work and Stalin himself. Secret police spied on citizens, and anyone who refused to praise Stalin and the state faced severe punishment, even death” (“The Soviet”, n.d.).

The Russian Revolution and the purges of Leninist and Stalinist Russia have spawned a literary output that is as diverse as it is voluminous. Darkness at Noon, a novel detailing the infamous Moscow Show Trials, conducted during the reign of Joseph Stalin is Arthur Koestler’s commentary upon the event that was yet another attempt by Stalin to silence his critics. In the novel, Koestler expounds upon Marxism, and the reason why a movement that had as its aim the “regeneration of mankind, should issue in its enslavement” and how, in spite of its drawbacks, it still held an appeal for intellectuals. It is for this reason that Koestler may have attempted “not to solve but to expose” the shortcomings of this political system and by doing so

“In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win!” Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Soviet dissident, espoused this philosophy to the Swedish Academy. He spoke of the power of art in combating the tyranny and lies of a corrupt government, and as a medium for evaluating society. He was at various times, a soldier in the Soviet army, a political prisoner of the Soviet state, a celebrity for his literary works, and an exile from all of Russia. His fiery philippic against Stalin landed him in prison for eight years; his account of prison life made him immensely popular during the de-Stalinization years of the early 1960’s, and he was deported for his most famous work, The Gulag Archipelago. He has become a symbol of the

Were it a testimony to the rigors and cruelness of human nature, it would be crushing. As it is, it shatters our perception of man and ourselves as no other book, besides perhaps Anne Franke`s diary and the testimony of Elie Wiesl, could ever have done. The prisoners of the labor camp, as in Shukhov?s predicament, were required to behave as Soviets or face severe punishment. In an almost satirical tone Buinovsky exclaims to the squadron that ?You?re not behaving like Soviet People,? and went on saying, ?You?re not behaving like communist.? (28) This type of internal monologue clearly persuades a tone of aggravation and sarcasm directly associated to the oppression?s of communism.

The purpose of this analysis is to show how the themes of the novel are loosely based on the events in the soviet union, and the similarities between the world of big brother and Joseph Stalin’s communistic leadership.

From Stalin’s Cult of Personality to Khrushchev’s period of De-Stalinization, the nation of the Soviet Union was in endless disarray of what to regard as true in the sense of a socialist direction. The short story, This is Moscow Speaking, written by Yuli Daniel (Nikolai Arzhak) represents the ideology that the citizens of the USSR were constantly living in fear of the alternations of their nation’s political policies. Even more, the novella gives an explanation for the people’s desire to conform to the principles around them.

gaining momentum in which Stalin toasted the writers saying, “Here someone correctly said that a writer must not sit still, that a writer must know the life of a country. And that is correct. Man is remade by life itself. But you, too, will assist in remaking his soul. That is important, the production of souls. And that is why I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul.” (Finn, Couvee 5). While Stalin may have toasted the writers in that moment, much like Ahkmatova discusses in her poem “The Last Toast” this speech on Stalin’s behalf was filled with lies that ultimately betrayed the writers of the Soviet Union, because rather than helping to engineer human souls, those who went along with the propaganda and Stalin were crushing their own souls, the souls of their colleagues, and the souls of a country.

It was the only way to find relief for the constant ache. I could not bear to burn the photographs, they were too lovely. And deep inside, I knew I couldn't disorient the truth. I began making copies of the photographs. I kept the originals in a box under my new bed. I would cut you out of the photographs or erase like, Stalin censoring Trotsky in Russia. We talked about the situation in Russia before you were displaced from my life. Do you remember? You were angry at communists and angered at Stalin’s measures to keep power, you said it was the “falsification of history”. The irony is scornful. From a nurse to a housewife, I became a plastic surgeon. Only it wasn’t a face I was fixing but, a memory. A girlfriend took me out to dancing on

The Master and Margarita is written by Mikhail Bulgakov. Bulgakov is one of the most well known Russian writers of the 20th century, and he is also noted for the rejection of the principles of the officially accepted literary method. "Bulgakov considered the writer's freedom to be more important than the goals of the Soviet government and was true to himself and his ideals in creating his literary works" (Yurkchenko 2). The Master and Margarita is a proof of Bulgakov's rejection of the principles of the officially accepted literary method. In The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov vividly portrays the true life of Moscow under the