Popular Culture
- The Cheka were popular staples in Soviet film and literature. This was partly due to a romanticization of the organisation in the post-Stalin period, and also because they provided a useful action/detection template. Films featuring the Cheka include Ostern's Miles of Fire, Nikita Mikhalkov's At Home among Strangers, the miniseries The Adjutant of His Excellency, and also Dead Season (starring Donatas Banionis), and the 1992 Russian drama film The Chekist.
- In Spain, during the Spanish Civil War, the detention and torture centers operated by the Communists were named "checas" after the Soviet organization. Alfonso Laurencic was their promoter, ideologist and builder.
Read more about this topic: Cheka
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)