Word: czarists
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...have been recycled, why not some of the unpopular styles? Old Communists, for example. They really did make them better years ago. One of the best models was the brilliant, arrogant, vain, dogmatic, versatile Bolshevik, Lev Davidovich Bronstein. He called himself Trotsky, after a jailer at the czarist prison where he once served time. Trotsky was not without wit. When Nicholas II's troops came to break up a revolutionary meeting, the young radical ordered the commanding officer to sit down until recognized under Robert's Rules of Order...
...great day" when the gates of Israel would be opened to accept masses of Soviet Jews. Ben-Gurion's prophecy is now coming true: the gates are indeed swinging wide for the largest wave of Russian Jews to leave their homeland since the days of the czarist pogroms. Last year 15,000 arrived, against only 1,000 in 1970; this year, 45,000 are expected. If the flow continues at this pace-something that depends on the mercurial emigration policies of Soviet authorities-500,000 Russian Jews will have landed in Israel...
...stylized griffin's head, to new figurines that are apparently the Russian equivalent of those excruciating ashtrays one is offered in Texas airports. Mother Russia has dumped the contents of her apron into the Corcoran, and the result is a heterogeneous pile of modern kitsch, late czarist elegance and early barbaric splendor, mingled with the beautifully wrought and unpretentious products of pre-Revolutionary folk artists. The less said about official post-Revolutionary folk art the better: it is characterized (except for some fine Baltic textiles) by an earnest garishness -in short, it is no better than the output...
...high points of the show are the icons and the opulent czarist bibelots. But then the question of the limits of folk art comes up. Can the men who wrought a jeweled bowl, half boat and half bird, for Czar Michael Fedorovich Romanov in 1624 be called folk artists? Obviously not. This courtly paradigm of imperial extravagance is of an order quite different from the decorated spindles, distaffs and painted figures of the Russian provinces...
...that often mars Western studies of Russian politics and the dogmatism that distorts Soviet scholarship. For example. Medvedev proves a hard-digging detective, while at the same time a fair judge of evidence, in his handling of the persistent story that Stalin worked as a double agent for the Czarist secret police before the revolution. Much as Medvedev detests the dictator and therefore may have wanted to believe this rumor himself, he reviews the case in nine tightly argued pages, finds it inconclusive and acquits Stalin of the charge...