Word: czarists
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When the 1914 war with Germany broke out, Czarist Russia was unprepared. Yet she instantly sent two armies into East Prussia. Both were ill-equipped, underfed and hampered from headquarters by more than the usual complement of careerist nitwits, blockheaded aristocrats and plain cowards familiar in the literature of military debacle. In the resulting battle, the Russian Second Army, lumbering westward in the vicinity of Tannenberg, was enveloped by the Germans. More than 90,000 prisoners were taken. In a few days, despite great courage shown by many Russian regiments and officers, the Second Army ceased to exist. Its brave...
...much puffed (and huffed at) new novel. In an occasionally quite tedious way, the battle is the book. Understandably so. August 1914 is the first of a many-volumed effort by Solzhenitsyn to re-create modern Russian history in truthful fiction. Tannenberg was a decisive battle from which the Czarist regime and the Russian war effort never recovered. But there are moments when the reader, plugging along with the hungry troops or trying to feel the requisite rage at the chicanery of the book's archvillain General Zhilinski, longs for a series of those day-by-day position maps...
...most prominent dachnik, Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, has a weekend getaway spot near Barvikha, where he entertained Richard Nixon during the Moscow summit meetings. Former President Anastas Mikoyan has retired to Zubalovo, an estate surrounding a manor house decorated with marble statues, tapestries and stained glass. In czarist times it belonged to an oil millionaire; Joseph Stalin later expropriated the estate and included one of its mansions among his nine dachas around Moscow and in his native Georgia...
...with 15 outfits, including a few that could be worn in any weather-a prime consideration for a woman traveling from Moscow to Teheran. Wherever she went, she was accompanied by wives of top Soviet officials, who are normally withdrawn and formal. They joined her for tea in the czarist family apartments in the Kremlin or posed gamely for incessant picture taking in front of statues in Red Square...
...religious education for children. Even the ringing of church bells is forbidden: "Why should Russia be deprived of her most ancient adornment, her most beautiful voice?" Although critical of Orthodoxy's subservience to the state, Solzhenitsyn acknowledged that the church was hardly less obedient in czarist days. "Russian history might have been incomparably more humane and harmonious in the last few centuries," he wrote, "if the church had not surrendered its independence...