Stalin Era

Workers rebuilding a 19th century Moscow house unearthed the remains of nearly three dozen people apparently dating back nearly 70 years to the era of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's political purges, police said Thursday. Police also found a rusted pistol on the estate where the remains of an estimated 34 people were found, some of which bore gunshots to the head, said police spokesman Yevgeny Gildeyev.

Jan Sawka Poster artist and architect Jan Sawka, 65, a noted Polish American artist and architect whose designs included posters for theatrical productions and touring sets for the Grateful Dead, died Thursday after suffering a heart attack at his studio and home in High Falls, N.Y., his family said in a statement. Sawka (pronounced SAFF-ka) had 70 solo shows at international museums and galleries, and his paintings, posters and prints hang in more than 60 museums around the world.

They are political prisoners, branded "enemies of the people" under Stalin. They have been banished to a ramshackle fishing village in the Soviet north, where they live alongside but apart from the villagers. Their names are Luzga and Kopalych, and they are the heroes of a new Soviet film that illustrates the country's confusion after the death of Joseph V. Stalin in March, 1953, and its continuing attempt to come to grips with his legacy.

Russians told this joke during Stalin's reign of terror: "Comrades, who was better leader, Premiere Stalin or Pres-ee-dent Hoover?" "Hoover, Hoover taught Americanski not to drink!" "But comrades!" spouted another, "Stalin taught Russian worker not to eat!" Russian classical composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75), whose magnificent music was banned by Josef Stalin, may not have found the joke amusing. The Los Angeles Philharmonic recently performed the world premiere of the prologue to Shostakovich's "lost" opera "Orango," a pro-Socialist lampoon of an ugly, greedy, half-man, half-ape capitalist.

Death hasn't silenced all the old Russian Revolutionaries. Some are still speaking volumes, as long as half a century after they were purged, shot, exiled--or died peacefully at their desks. That's the case at UC Riverside, where an American computer is electronically resurrecting old Bolsheviks and bureaucrats from obscurity.

In Peter Weir's "The Way Back," which opened late last month for a brief Oscar-qualifying run and releases again on Jan. 21, a group of prisoners escapes a Stalin-era Siberian gulag by walking all the way to India. The film is structured very much as an ensemble, with equal moments given to Ed Harris, Saoirse Ronan, Colin Farrell and others, but it is British-born actor Jim Sturgess, portraying a Polish prisoner named Janusz, who is in many ways the audience's point of entry. The story not only opens with him, but also his character's desire to return to his wife is the emotional fulcrum on which the action moves.

On March 5, 1953, before dawn, I was awakened by the sounds of the allegretto from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. Josef Stalin was dead. It wasn't my love for Stalin that made me cry. It was fear. I thought of the faceless functionaries who stood with him on the mausoleum during parades, people I couldn't distinguish from one another. Now one of them would become the Great Leader. God help us all.

Russians told this joke during Stalin's reign of terror: "Comrades, who was better leader, Premiere Stalin or Pres-ee-dent Hoover?" "Hoover, Hoover taught Americanski not to drink!" "But comrades!" spouted another, "Stalin taught Russian worker not to eat!" Russian classical composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75), whose magnificent music was banned by Josef Stalin, may not have found the joke amusing. The Los Angeles Philharmonic recently performed the world premiere of the prologue to Shostakovich's "lost" opera "Orango," a pro-Socialist lampoon of an ugly, greedy, half-man, half-ape capitalist.

What is totally missing from the article is any admission by Sigal of the correctness of the warnings of the Young Americans for Freedom and the John Birch Society of the evils of Communism and the atrocities of the Stalin era, as well as the atrocities of other Communist dictators in the Soviet Union and other East Bloc countries, and in Central American and Asian countries. It's amazing how the left can so easily gloss over history--even as history is currently being made. CURTIS BAER Pacific Palisades

An independent anti-Stalinist movement was founded in Moscow with a mandate to expose Stalin Era repression and ensure it is never repeated. After several hours of interruptions and haggling over procedures, the charter of the Memorial Movement was approved by 500 delegates from more than 100 Soviet towns and cities at the two-day founding meeting. "Finally this day has arrived," veteran human rights campaigner Andrei D. Sakharov told the gathering.

In Peter Weir's "The Way Back," which opened late last month for a brief Oscar-qualifying run and releases again on Jan. 21, a group of prisoners escapes a Stalin-era Siberian gulag by walking all the way to India. The film is structured very much as an ensemble, with equal moments given to Ed Harris, Saoirse Ronan, Colin Farrell and others, but it is British-born actor Jim Sturgess, portraying a Polish prisoner named Janusz, who is in many ways the audience's point of entry. The story not only opens with him, but also his character's desire to return to his wife is the emotional fulcrum on which the action moves.

Workers rebuilding a 19th century Moscow house unearthed the remains of nearly three dozen people apparently dating back nearly 70 years to the era of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's political purges, police said Thursday. Police also found a rusted pistol on the estate where the remains of an estimated 34 people were found, some of which bore gunshots to the head, said police spokesman Yevgeny Gildeyev.

DANNY HO can't believe what he's seeing outside of the Key Club on a busy Saturday night. "A Russian rapper is playing here tonight?" the 23-year-old asks incredulously of the doorman behind the velvet rope. When informed tickets start at $60, he scoffs: "Even if Eminem was playing tonight, I would never pay $60! If there are more than 100 people in there, I'd be shocked."

A mordant fusion of comedy and outrage, "Red Star" is a characteristically bitter offering from British playwright Charles Wood, also notable for the screenplays "Help!" and "The Knack." Wood, who came in on the tail end of the Angry Young Man epoch in British theater, neatly avoids the curmudgeonliness that has afflicted many of his contemporaries. Full of rage and not a little horror, "Red Star" is still a brass-plated hoot.

Sergo Gegechkori, 75, who tried in vain to clear his father's name of crimes committed in the Soviet Union's Stalinist era. His request for a pardon for his father, dreaded Soviet secret police chief Lavrenty Beria, was rejected by a Russian military court in May. Beria was executed by a firing squad in 1953 for rape, terror and spying for 14 foreign countries.

Some of our most familiar assumptions about the Cold War are mutating, and books like "The Haunted Wood" are partly responsible. The mask has fallen from the corpse of Soviet totalitarianism; much of what we have learned since 1991 surpasses even bleak Cold War suspicions of the regime that Lenin and Stalin created. The old '60s rhetoric that portrayed democracy and totalitarianism as equivalent evils, locked in morally content-less confrontation, stands exposed as a shameful absurdity.

The Soviet Union will enter five films at the Cannes International Film Festival this month, including the movie "Repentance"--a film so blunt in depicting the horror of the Stalin era it was banned for two years immediately after its completion. In another sign of a cultural thaw under Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev's reform policies, the Soviet Union will enter a documentary film, "Is It Easy to Be Young?"--a hard-biting look by Latvian director Juri Podnieks at disaffected Soviet youth.

Lazar M. Kaganovich, the last surviving political lieutenant of Josef Stalin and a key engineer of the Soviet dictator's bloody farm collectivization drive and terror campaigns of the 1930s, has died at age 97, the Tass news agency reported Friday. Tass gave no further details. But with the passing of Kaganovich, an era in Soviet history came to an end.

Alexander Gelver was afraid. People around him were getting arrested. He wanted to get out of the country, to go home to America, so he went to the U.S. Embassy for help. But outside the gates, he was stopped--by the secret police. Was it true, his interrogator demanded, that Gelver thought life was better in the United States than the Soviet Union? Had he actually said as much to his fellow workers at a local factory?

Anya Pryanikova's hunt for a husband took a strange turn just before New Year's, when she married her cousin for the sake of a dull-looking black ink stamp. She liked her cousin, Alyosha, just fine. But not in a romantic, lustful sort of way. Pryanikova agreed to exchange vows with him for one reason alone: to help him obtain a Moscow propiska, a residence permit allowing him to live and work in Russia's capital.