Word: bolsheviks
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Back in 1955, when Soviet Communism wanted to smile, shake hands and play pen pals with the West after Stalin's death, the Kremlin had use for Bulganin's smooth good looks, benign good manners, and easy way with a glass. Bulganin was an Old Bolshevik whose long years of managing Soviet agencies without ever saying a flat yes or no had only enhanced his ability to look, dress and propose toasts like a Belgian burgomaster. "A real gentleman;' cooed a French chorus girl from a visiting troupe he once called on backstage at the Bolshoi...
...concerted decision was taken by the leading Allies (Britain, France, Japan and the U.S.) during six months (March through August 1918) of diplomatic maneuverings leading up to joint troop landings on Russian soil. Author Kennan makes plain that the initial urge to intervene was based not on the Bolshevik but the German menace. The treaty of Brest-Litovsk took Russia out of the war and left the Germans free to mount what was to be their last massive offensive on the Western Front. The Allies also feared that the port of Murmansk and tens of thousands of tons...
...Ambassador Francis sometimes added a weird and wily nugget of his own. On one occasion, he authorized the chief of the American military mission to help Trotsky in the formation of the new Red army on the ground that such an army could "by proper methods be taken from Bolshevik control and used against Germans, and even [against] its creators." Nevertheless, since official Washington offered scant guidance. Historian Kennan gives Francis high marks for showing as much "fidelity, persistence, courage...
...Little, Too Late. Despite Kennan's strenuous objectivity, one inescapable conclusion leaps from the pages of his book-taken rapidly and resolutely, the decision to intervene would have snapped Bolshevik power like a twig. More than a score of separate Russian governments were contesting Lenin's right to rule on Russian soil. The Russian people were famine-ridden and war-weary. Lenin himself relied on endless improvisation. If this was one of history's great lost opportunities, the chief culprit was Wood-row Wilson. Democrat Kennan admits: "[Wilson] drew onto himself, ultimately, the blame for the failure...
VICENTE BLASCO IBÁÑEZ. terrible-tempered, anticlerical novelist, was looking for a female lead for the movie of his novel. Blood and Sand, when at a party he met pious, vixen-toothed Actress Nita ("Nixie") Naldi, who screamed forthwith: "You Bolshevik! You heathen! . . . You worm! You Pagan! You anti-Christ!" Ibanez shrilled back so excitedly that his -'upper plate fell out of his mouth into Nixie's bosom." Whereupon the hostess, "who had hoped for a stimulating evening, but not this stimulating, quickly reached down into Nixie, pulled out the teeth, rinsed them in the punch...