In one of the essential books published in the twentieth century, The Great Terror (1968; rev. 1990, 2008), Robert Conquest (1917-2015) writes matter-of-factly: “We are told in recent Soviet articles that on 12 December 1937 alone, Stalin and Molotov sanctioned 3,167 death sentences, and then went to the cinema.” Conquest doesn’t specify what movie the dictator and his toady went to see but among the films released that year, at least in the U.S., were A Day at the Races, The Life of Emile Zola and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Stalin had home movie projection rooms set up in his various residences and we know he was a fan of Tarzan the Ape Man, with Johnny Weissmuller in the starring role, John Ford’s Stagecoach and the films of Charlie Chaplin, including The Great Dictator.
Most of the
books in the category described above are not found in the traditionally
defined literary categories; that is, novels, poetry, plays. They tend to be
histories and memoirs, most related to communism, and include works by the
Mandelstams, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, Whitaker Chambers and two rare writers of
fiction, Arthur Koestler and Vasily Grossman. Conquest contributes a poem,
probably his best-known limerick:
“There was a
great Marxist called Lenin
Who did two
or three million men in.
That’s a lot to have done in
But where he did one in
That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.”
2 comments:
Is that a list to which you could link or, better, publish right here? I take it this is your own list. I am in any event eager to see how many of those books I already have -- it should be an appreciable number.
Certainly Rebecca west's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon belongs in that category.
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