A Quote by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Under Stalin, artists weren't dissidents; all they hoped was to survive and write.
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Dissidents can't be dissidents forever; we are dissidents because we don't want to be dissidents.
The communists basically acted as the police force of the security system of the [Spain] Republic and were very much opposed to the anarchists, partially because [Joseph] Stalin still hoped at that time to have some kind of pact with Western countries against [Adolf] Hitler. That, of course, failed and Stalin withdrew the support to the Republic. They even withdrew the Spanish gold reserves.
If we artists are to survive this period at all - we will survive as spokesmen, never again as entertainers.
As long as artists can make something, artists will continue to survive.
Regarding themselves as irreplaceable, both Lenin and Stalin tried in different ways to destroy their successors - Lenin through a testament that attacked Stalin and Trotsky, Stalin through purges culminating in the Doctors' Plot of 1953.
In Stalin each [Soviet bureaucrat] easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.
Not to name names, but a lot of pop female artists you see, they don't write their own songs. Lot of top male artists and boy band artists, they don't write their own songs. They're just a product. They sell, they sell, they sell. They don't care about musical integrity, any of that kind of stuff.
I count myself as not only just an artist, not only as a singer, but a business woman. I write my own songs; I write my own video treatments, manage other artists. I write for other artists; it's not just about getting on stage and singing a song.
I know they say (Stalin) killed 20, 30, 40 million people. It's bullsh*t. (I have yet to find) one crime that Stalin committed.
It was this feeling for a lot of my characters, who are dissidents or banned artists and writers, that they had had to fight living under so much surveillance, and then suddenly they come to America and they're like, I'm not being surveilled - I'm not even being noticed at all.
Stalin said artists are the engineers of human souls. I wanted to show what happens to the soul when the engineers get through with it.
There are still some people who think that we have Stalin to thank for all our progress, who quake before Stalin's dirty under-draws, who stand at attention and salute them.
We became convinced that, regardless of Stalin's awful brutality and his reign of terror, he was a great war leader. Without Stalin, they never would have held.
While public school history courses in the United States stress the horrors of the German Nazi murder of 6 million Jews and Josef Stalin's pogroms against racial minorities and political dissidents in the Soviet Union, the facts that the U.S. Army's solution to the 'Indian Problem' was the prototype for the Nazi 'Final Solution' to the 'Jewish Problem' and that the North American Indian Reservation was the model for the twentieth century gulag and concentration camp, are conveniently overlooked.
(I)t is simply wrong to confuse cowardice with appeasement. Cowardice is a failing of character. Appeasement is a failure of policy. Stalin appeased Hitler when he signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Stalin was an evil character, to be sure. But cowardice really isn't the first word that comes to mind when thinking of Stalin ' that word is “sexy.” I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
Usually a feeling of disappointment follows the book, because what I hoped to write is not what I actually accomplished. However, it becomes a motivation to write the next book.
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