Word: factly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Pressure on Viet Nam is the only way we can improve the situation," says one Western ambassador in Bangkok. But who can apply that pressure? The U.S. does not have diplomatic relations with Hanoi-a fact that some observers believe pushed Viet Nam even further into Moscow's orbit. China, of course, has just fought a war with Viet Nam, while Moscow openly supports Hanoi's attempt to subdue Cambodia, The worldwide outcry over the refugees has only just begun to have an effect on Hanoi-but as for getting out of Cambodia, the Vietnamese so far have...
...million people of this France-size land call their country Muang-Thai, which means land of the free. Thailand, in fact, is the only country in Southeast Asia that was never colonized by a Western power. For centuries the country has managed to survive the ambitions of would-be occupiers through a combination of diplomatic guile, compromise, opportunism and sheer luck...
...Contemporary, the journal of the Russian Writers Union, is currently serializing At the Last Frontier by Valentin Pikul. The book is a canny mix of fact and rumor about the monk, whose skill in doctoring the Tsarina's sick son gained him inordinate influence over the royal family in the final decade of the Russian empire. By prudish Soviet standards, Pikul's empurpled prose is downright lurid. In one key scene, for example, Rasputin sneaks up to the Tsarina as she prays for her hemophiliac son. Out of the shadows steps the "bony peasant, his face framed...
Author Pikul's suggestion that the empress slept with Rasputin, for which there is no basis in fact, seems designed merely to appeal to the prurient interests of the proletariat. So do passages alluding to Rasputin's vast sexual appetite and his zest for orgies-which have been amply documented by historians. But the book seemingly has other and more unsavory functions. One is to encourage the xenophobia that still has a strong hold on the many Russian chauvinists in the elite, who believe that alien forces have caused their homeland's troubles down through the ages...
...tenuous basis for these charges is the historical fact that Rasputin, for a Russian of his time, was unusually friendly to Jews. Considering his besmirched reputation in other respects, Rasputin would appear to be an unlikely hero to Soviet human rights activists. But at least one celebrated dissident has taken up his cause. Andrei Amalrik told TIME last week that he was writing a book on Rasputin that would show the monk had a good influence on Tsar Nicholas II. "Rasputin was a very simple person with very good ideas," said the exiled Russian writer, who is doing research...