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Don't believe in evil, as it happens. But that's another discussion.

Regardless of who did it, the plays were banned. This has never on my part been a thread designed to demonise JVS.



What...

No, banning his plays is.



You're confusing legality with morality.



Both statements are valid. Lasted nearly seventy years, did the USSR.

That's an extremely iffy technicality.



Stalin took a personal, and oddly patriarchal interest in the affairs of various prominent artists, including Shostakovich, Pasternak and Bulgakov. In...

Fair enough. An ideology is a body of beliefs.



Nonsense. All of the features of 'HR' (do you mean Human Rights Watch in particular or human rights in general?) you supply as justification for...

I thought he was pretty naive too.



You need to express yourself more clearly, then. When you ask 'How was creativity disallowed in the USSR?' (not 'economic creativity'), you leave yourself...

You asked: 'How was creativity disallowed in the USSR?'. As far as I can see, the 'disallowing' of creativity is suppression.



You asked: 'How was creativity disallowed in the USSR?'. It...

Simple: because, as far as I can tell, Human Rights Watch has no ideological axe to grind. This sets it apart from JJ, who seems hell-bent on assuming the mantle of apologist for Soviet Communism.

No, of course he didn't. He did, however, find himself in Gorky/Nizhny Novgorod against his will.

Does that not constitute suppression?



Mandelstam paid for a poem with his life; Tsvetaeva...

I'll take their word over your 'experience', if you don't mind.



Oh, you 'bet', do you? Smacks of speculation to me. Do your research.

http://www.hrw.org/asia/china.php


Just look at the People's Republic of China, JJ.

But, then again, at least they can *spell* Kalashnikov these days.

I'm not sure I hold with this notion that it's the guns which kill people.

does anybody else mourn the Cold War, in a way?

The fall of the Iron Curtain sounded a death knell not just for totalitarian government in Europe (hurrah), but also for Western (and perhaps...