Word: bolshevik
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...Alan Shepard scratched his back on the edge of space and America entered the manned space race. At last. Since 1957 there had been all those Sputniks-Mechtas and Vostoks-beeping overhead, clockwork reminders that the heavens were in the hands of the godless Bolshevik. The script had gone awry. A nation only 40 years from feudalism was secretly lobbing what looked like customized samovars at the free world while priapic Vanguards and Jupiters wilted on their pads or exploded prematurely for all the world to see. Democracy could be embarrassing...
...sheer public craving for romance has kept alive the case of Anastasia, daughter of Czar Nicholas II, who may or may not have escaped the Bolshevik assassins in 1918; undying interest has given wide hearings to several claimants to the identity of Anastasia. The divergent ideological fevers of mid-century America guaranteed that the Alger Hiss perjury case would stay effectively open right along with the case of the executed spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The arguments in both trials are still thundering forth in such books as Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case by Allen Weinstein (against Hiss...
...have got so worked up over their women as Louis Aragon and Vladimir Mayakovsky. For nearly 40 years the poet laureate of the French Communist Party rhapsodized in verse over Les Yeux d'Elsa and other cherished features of his wife Elsa Triolet. Mayakovsky, the bard of the Bolshevik Revolution, was no less attentive to his mistress Lili Brik, though his poems were scarcely as complimentary as Aragon's. Lili was Elsa's older sister, and the series of stunning lyrics that Mayakovsky dedicated to her in the 1910s and 1920s agonized over her indifference and infidelity...
Elsa and Lili were born in the 1890s, the daughters of a well-to-do Jewish lawyer in Moscow. Before the Revolution, Mayakovsky had courted Elsa, flouting her family's objections to the scruffy, hulking poet who had served a prison term at 16 for Bolshevik subversion. But when Elsa, who was quite plain, introduced him to her handsome married sister in 1915, Mayakovsky formed a passionate attachment to Lili that only his suicide in 1930 could terminate. After his death, these redoubtable sisters were to play key roles in the production of the Mayakovsky legend. Settling in France...
...changes in the administration, he carefully hedged his bets; he selected a committee "heavily weighted to be supportive of the establishment," James C. Thomson Jr., then a junior faculty member who served on the committee, says. "They didn't know initially that Thomson would turn out to be the Bolshevik member of the committee or that Harry Levin would be my closest ally," Thomson adds. Levin seconds Thomson's evaluation of the predominantly middle-of-the-road sentiments of the committee members, but adds that events at Harvard that spring changed many members' viewpoints after they had been appointed...