Word: czars
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Custine reports that when a squall hit a flotilla of small craft carrying "chosen bourgeoisie" on an outing to Czar Nicholas I's seaside palace, scores were drowned. The newspapers suppressed the disaster, so as not to "distress the Czarina [or] imply blame to the Czar." By a similar procedure, when a serving girl was murdered in a back street, the police did not bother to report the crime, but were careful to make a few rubles by selling her body to medical students for dissection...
When a theologian dared to take issue with the Orthodox Church, the Czar pronounced him insane, ordered him committed to an asylum. After a series of special treatments, the man confessed that the Czar was right, he was indeed insane-a story that might, with a twist or two, have come straight out of the Moscow treason trials or out of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon...
However, such incidents had their justification, as no less a personage than His Majesty graciously explained to the marquis at a grand levee. "Despotism," the Czar charmingly admitted, "is the essence of my government; but it is in keeping with the character of the nation...
...Future In Black. The marquis regretfully concluded that the Czar was not far wrong about the Russians, at that. "Other nations have tolerated oppression; the Russian nation has loved it; she still loves it . . . An oppressed people has always merited its suffering; tyranny is the work of nations . . . However, it cannot be denied that this popular mania has become the principle of sublime actions. In this inhumane country, if society has denatured man it has not shrunk him . . . He is not good but he is not paltry...
...Copters. Igor Sikorsky, now 61, has been working 42 years to win such recognition for the egg beater. He designed his first helicopter in Russia in 1908, but it never got far off the ground. Sikorsky turned to plane design, turned out the first four-engine ship for the Czar's air force in World...