Word: czars
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...quality coffee in U.S. grocery stores edged up last week past $1.15 - only 15? short of 1954's peak price and a fat 26? higher than 1955'$ low. This time around, the trail of cause and effect appeared to lead straight back to shrewd Manuel Mejia, czar of the Colombian Federation of Coffeegrowers...
Last December Department of Agriculture reporters estimated that Colombia's current crop would run to a record 6,500,000 bags for export. Czar Mejia, who keeps his figures secret, remained silent. But in succeeding months word some how drifted from Bogota to Manhattan's coffee-trading Front Street that torrential rains had cut deeply into Colombia's maturing crop. Roasters and brokers, caught with low inventories and suddenly aware that a shortage of mild beans for blending could be crippling, bid up the price from 63? to 80? a Ib. Colombia's mild coffee, which...
Born in Moscow a few months before Napoleon entered the Czar's tinder capital (1812), Alexander Herzen grew up a bastard aristocrat in a land of serfs, hating the vast sloth of the barbarous empire. Like many another conscience-stricken property owner of his time, he became one of the wild geese of Russia who flapped about Europe hoping that their words would huff and puff down the Byzantine walls of the czardom...
...sense of his own dignity could live in Russia." Yet Herzen had the realism to understand, 75 years before Stalin, that an inefficient despotism is preferable to an efficient one. With a visionary eye he looked across the steppes of history and foresaw that the witless crudity of the Czar's bureaucrats might be less evil than a regime speaking in the name of brotherly love. Herzen's shrewd mind took the slogans of Europe's libertarian movement and arrived at the wisdom of the American Negro spiritual-"Everybody talkin' 'bout heaven...
...Bolsheviks won this game of chess by a fool's mate. The fools, of one sort or another, were the gullible men of the Western embassies. In the evening of Nov. 7, 1917, the Czar's Winter Palace was "stormed"-by the back door. Kennan sardonically notes, for, amid the confusion and vacillation of the defenders, someone had inadvertently left the back door open. At the time, British Ambassador Sir George Buchanan was gloomily watching artillery from the River Neva (blanks from the Russian cruiser Aurora, usually credited with a main role in the palace's capture...