Word: czarists
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Died. Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, 77, squat, solemn Soviet marshal dubbed "the Eisenhower of Russia"; of a heart attack; in Moscow. Zhukov fought in World War I as a Czarist dragoon, in 1918 suited up as a Red Army cavalryman. After weathering both the shift to mechanized warfare and Stalin's purges of military professionals, Zhukov was Chief of Staff when Hitler first trained his guns on the U.S.S.R. In 1941 the marshal smashed the myth of Nazi invincibility by engineering the defense of Moscow with a flood of Siberian troops, and later won the great battles of Stalingrad, Leningrad...
...initiated a correspondence in my name with Vassili Orekhov, the director of the Russian National Association. It is a small émigré organization based in Brussels that deals with czarist military history. The KGB devised letters in which my handwriting was forged. At first the letters contained only innocent requests for information about the first World War. Then followed a suggestion, purportedly from me, that Orekhov come to Prague or send a representative...
...building superintendent who fished a landscape out of a garbage can ten years ago was assured by the experts that it was worth $6,500. A Brooklyn couple who brought in what they thought was a "Communion tray" learned that it was an enamel punch bowl crafted by a czarist court silversmith, worth up to $15,000. A Manhattan secretary who produced a battered pottery dog used as a plaything by her children was informed that it was Ha'n dynasty (206 B.C.A.D. 220) porcelain, worth $5,250, which might have fetched...
...America. Those facets of his life which would upset a hero's image stand too close to the surface to be abstracted into a legend. For example, he lives as a millionaire in Switzerland. He calls for the revival of the Russian Orthodox church, a brutal arm of czarist oppression before 1917. He branded former Attorney General Ramsey Clark a "fluttering butterfly" for ignoring Russian dissidents, but visiting POW camps in Hanoi. Solzhenitsyn is among the most conservative of the Soviet dissidents, and in an age where people call for detente, his protests ring with Cold War echoes...
Solzhenitsyn perceives that an entire nation has been debased by four decades of totalitarianism far more oppressive than Czarist authoritarianism. Ordinary people have been rendered indifferent to injustice and pitiless toward the suffering of others. Among bureaucrats, the absolute exercise of power in the past continues to corrupt absolutely in the present. "Thus," he mourns, "have we been driven to become savages...