Word: belorussians
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...lived nearby. But not until last spring did the full horror begin to be known. Workers digging a trench for a gas pipeline through the forest near Minsk came across a heap of human skulls pierced by bullets from Nagant revolvers fired at close range. The prosecutor of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic set up a commission to investigate the murders. Last July more skulls and bones were unearthed, along with paraphernalia of everyday life -- remnants of packed lunches, purses filled with kopecks -- indicating that the people had been snatched from their daily routines to be shot. With that...
There are signs that the revision of history is going further than Gorbachev ever bargained for. Some members of Memorial and other intellectuals have begun calling for a public trial of Stalin, a move that might raise questions embarrassing to the Communist leadership. Still, as Belorussian writer Alexander Adamovich says, "had there not been a trial at Nuremberg, Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz or Buchenwald might have been denied by later generations. Our history must also have a legal foundation based on solid documentation...
Only one concrete move looked like U.S. retaliation for Daniloff's confinement. On Wednesday American officials handed Soviet U.N. Ambassador Alexander Belonogov the names of 25 members of the Soviet, Belorussian and Ukrainian U.N. missions who are to be expelled from the U.S. by Oct. 1. All 25 were intelligence officers, Administration officials said at a briefing in Washington. Six months ago, the U.S. had ordered the swollen mission staffs to be reduced by about 38% -- from 275 to 170 -- in four stages beginning Oct. 1, but had left it to Moscow to choose whom to send packing...
...most recent novel, A Family Madness, Keneally returns to the inexpungible memories of World War II, this time from the point of view of collaborators in the murder of Jews. His central characters are the Kabbelskis, a family of politically active Belorussians who make common cause with the Germans in an effort to secure an autonomous homeland for their people. They are motivated less by anti-Semitism than by the rueful lessons of a millennium of conquests from east and west. Banding together with other helpless minorities seems to offer no chance of gaining power. But connivance may. Stanislaw Kabbelski...
...outline, this tale of sexual obsession may seem all too recognizable. What sustains A Family Madness is, as usual in Keneally's work, a precise sense of historical authenticity. The minutiae of Belorussian politics become surprisingly absorbing. He captures the chaos of Europe at the close of World War II and the ways in which fateful political decisions of that time may have been prompted by petty domestic concerns. He writes aphoristically, "There is that to be said for liberals--they may be in no way equipped for governing the world, but they are admirable in specific cases of injustice...