Word: bern
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DIED. Valery Tarsis, 76, dissident Soviet novelist who was deprived of his U.S.S.R. citizenship in 1966 during a lecture tour of Britain, becoming the first in a modern line of enforced exiles; after a heart attack; in Bern, Switzerland. Once a writer and editor in good official standing, Tarsis grew disillusioned with Communism in the 1950s. The publication abroad of his scathing 1962 novel The Bluebottle earned him an eight-month stay in a Soviet mental hospital, an experience he described in his autobiographical novel Ward 7: "All around him were faces exposed by sleep or distorted by nightmares...
...sails in from outside one of Miller's shots, as it sometimes peculiarly does. The coach is played hard by Robert Mitchum, whose wise and cynical presence just does not suit a man living on nostalgia and dead ideas. The rest of the solid cast includes Bruce Bern, Stacy Keach and Paul Sorvino, who have their moments. But these never add up to persuasive performances...
Finally, the terrorists turned their political demands into a simple plea for safe conduct to Albania or China, and a $1.4 million ransom. The Swiss government immediately rejected that idea. Warsaw offered to send in its own antiterrorist squad to help the Bern police, but the Swiss firmly refused. Then the Swiss police made their move...
...thoughts that the Bern siege might have had political implications were laid to rest when Colonel Wysocki was finally identified by authorities. He turned out to be Florian Kruszyk, 42, a onetime member of the Polish state security apparatus who spent ten months in Austrian jails in 1968-69, after he was caught spying on Polish refugees. Thereafter, he served time for robbery. Kruszyk and his three associates, it turned out, had never belonged to Solidarity...
After the Swiss rescue operation, Polish officials conceded that there were no links between the terrorists and any groups in Poland. Despite that admission, the fact was that the Bern terrorists had given the military government a boost, rather than the opposite. Throughout the siege, the Jaruzelski regime was able to inveigh even more against the trade-union movement that the Communist leadership in Poland is striving to crush...