Word: czar
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...since Czar Nicholas wed Alexandra in 1894 have Russians encountered a ruler's wife with such presence, such personality, such promise as a subject of mild jokes and elevated eyebrows as Raisa Gorbachev. She is the first spouse of a Soviet leader to weigh less than he does, acid tongues have it in Moscow, and the first "Czarina," as some of her fellow citizens mock her, to appear in the Kremlin since the fall of the Romanovs. She is also the first Soviet First Lady to use an American Express card and, as a member of the board...
...centuries accorded books the brutal compliment of suppression. It has slain books by other means than fire. Book publishing first flourished in Russia under Catherine the Great, and yet it was she who used local police, corrupt and ignorant, to enforce the country's first censorship regulations. Czar Nicholas I conducted a sort of terrorism against certain books and writers. He functioned as personal censor for Pushkin and banished Dostoyevsky to Siberia. Revolution only encouraged the Russian candle-snuffers. Lenin said, "Ideas are much more fatal things than guns," a founder's nihil obstat that culminated in the years...
...little action in the war against drugs. All of them threaten to cut off aid to foreign nations that refuse to cooperate in stopping the flow of drugs. All urge more support for the Coast Guard, Customs and the Drug Enforcement Agency. All endorse the idea of a drug czar and increased funding for drug treatment and rehabilitation programs...
Still, his rigidity seems to be fading. The Boston visitors include Progressives Alfred Schnittke, 53, and Sofia Gubaidulina, 56, now recognized as two of the Soviet Union's best composers. And, of course, there is Shchedrin, favored to succeed Khrennikov someday as a culture czar, who was represented by his new opera Dead Souls. A licensed radical who sacrificed his genuine talent for the status of a pampered house pet, Shchedrin once wrote sparklers like the Carmen Suite, a vibrant 1967 gloss on Bizet that will be danced later this month by his wife Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya. Now, perhaps metaphorically...
...coffeepot used in aircraft. The principal remedy, lawmakers thought, would be to centralize all procurement authority in the hands of a single individual. Until then, such power had been spread among a myriad of departments. Said Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder, a Colorado Democrat: "We envisioned a czar who would kick trash cans and have rats jump...