“A vile slanderer seeking to earn filthy capitalist lucre by besmirching the homeland that nurtured him.”
The China People’s Daily, perhaps, on Friday’s Nobel Peace Prize ceremony for jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo?
No. Moscow’s Sovietskaya Rossia in 1970 on writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn who won the Nobel Literature Prize that year for works deemed anti-Soviet by the Kremlin.
“A hermit isolated from the people, wallowing in his own moral degradation.”
That was the official Soviet Writers’ Union in 1958 on Boris Pasternak, a poet and novelist who had just won the Nobel prize for his saga of the Revolution, “Doctor Zhivago.”
“A self-important nonentity whose scribblings and pronouncements on political matters show nothing but a wish to please his masters in the West.”
These were Moscow Radio’s comments at the time on previously honored physicist-turned-human rights campaigner Andrei Sakharov who in 1975 was named — like Liu this year — Nobel peace laureate.