True, there are documentary classics about Stalinism like The Gulag Archipelago or Robert Conquest's The Great Terror , but there is no popular, let alone academic, concentration on the criminality and inhumanity of Soviet history as there is about the dark German past. No Nuremberg trials for the Soviet killers and torturers, who are probably all receiving their pensions and, with their connections, receiving them on time. As for Lenin, he still lies in state in his Red Square tomb, and Stalin is interred in the Kremlin wall. Under Stalin's dispensation, being a writer was no guarantee of a long and serene existence.
More people die for poetry here than anywhere else.
There have been no Nuremburg trials for the Soviet killers and torturers, who are probably all receiving their pensions. This language had a remarkable vocabulary, remarkable not of course in that it was taken seriously in the Soviet Union but in that it was taken seriously in communist and fellow-traveling literary circles the world over. In the world of socialist realism, historical necessity, democratic centralism, revolutionary consciousness, workers of brain, and workers of brawn were all good, while hostile ideological tendencies, social fascism, deviationism, bourgeois philistine individualism, rootless cosmopolitanism, aesthetic hooliganism were all bad. In his novel The First Circle Alexander Solzhenitsyn notes that in a totalitarian society, a great writer is a second government because he exercises a moral authority that threatens the viability of a dictatorship. To make sure such a danger could never arise, the official Writers' Union of the The title spread from a 1950 English edition of Vasili Azhaev's Far from Moscow .