Word: armenia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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These opium poppies grow in Turkey. They are not your ordinary Papaver somniferum, but a new strain developed over eleven years by a Soviet scientist from Armenia. Infuriated by his government's decision to end the better-poppy-for-socialism program (his aim was to produce a more potent drug for medical use), Dr. Krikor Grotrian makes a deal to sell the seeds to an Armenian dealer, who smuggles them into Turkey. There, largely because they bear scarlet blooms rather than the more common white petals of opium flowers, they flourish undetected in the hinterland. What Grotrian does not realize...
DIED. Aram Khachaturian, 74, prolific Soviet composer whose works pulse with the rhythms of his ancestral Armenia; after a long illness; in Moscow. A patriot who celebrated the "wrath of the Soviet people waging a struggle for humanity" (Second Symphony, 1943) and a Roman slave insurrection (the ballet Spartacus, 1953), Khachaturian won numerous Soviet prizes, returning one 50,000-ruble Stalin award during the war and asking that a tank be built with the money. From the start of his career in the 1930s, he also involved himself with Communist Party politics, eventually becoming deputy chairman of the Union...
...York picture is not of the city. Arshile Gorky's The Artist and His Mother shows two proud, exhausted people as they might have landed at Ellis Island. It was painted, however, from an old snapshot and memory; Gorky's mother died of starvation In Soviet Armenia after the family had fled the Turkish massacre. Gorky remained obsessed by the tragedy all his life. In the years before he hanged himself in 1948, he painted abstract reveries from his past like Garden in Sochi...
...anecdotes and vignettes that constitute a witty, indelible portrait of the Soviet Union. Sweat, garlic and tobacco are the "characteristic smell of Moscow." Shoppers use no checks or credit cards; only the privileged in this "classless society" use scrip to buy luxury groceries at bargain prices. Three bathers in Armenia show off portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin tattooed on their chests...
PASSAGE TO ARARAT by Michael J. Arlen. The tribes of the Bible leap from the page, the victims of mass murder speak out in this intensely personal history of Armenia by a gifted descendant...