"Détente found little favour with those who saw themselves as realists. As an aspect of the tension between American policy and Ostpolitik, Kissinger scorned the Helsinki Accords; so also did Yuri Andropov, the powerful head of the KGB and the party chiefs of Belarus and Ukraine. In 1974, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, was arrested and exiled for his description of Stalinist terror in The Gulag Archipelago (1973). In Czechoslovakia, the ‘normalisation’ regime of Gustàv Husàk sought to renew the Communist Party in order to thwart the ‘dissidents’, such as Václav Havel, and their human rights organisation, Charter 77, which used the Helsinki Accords as a way to castigate the regime. In the very different context of Yugoslavia, there was also a strengthening of Communist authoritarianism as Tito suppressed the liberal Communists of both Croatia and Serbia. In East Germany, the continuing determination to control culture was demonstrated in 1976. The Palace of the Republic opened that year in East Berlin housed not only the Parliament but also leisure facilities and works of art commissioned under the rubric ‘Are Communists allowed to dream’, notably Hans Vent’s painting People on the Beach. The same year, Wolf Biermann, a prominent satirical balladeer, was expelled from East Germany."
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Academics from RussiaNovelists from RussiaShort story writers from RussiaPhilosophers from RussiaHistorians from Russia
Original Language: English
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Jeremy Black, The Cold War: A Military History (2015)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn [Алекса́ндр Иса́евич Солжени́цын] (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian philosopher, novelist, dramatist and historian. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, he was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974, returning to Russia in 1994.
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