Word: gulag
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...laughing on a snowy street in Moscow. "I wish I could smile the way you Americans do," he said. I asked why he couldn't. He said he'd been trained by his parents never to show emotions in public. A stray smile could be misinterpreted, could mean the Gulag. I realized then that my reaction to his joke had been a political statement - a reflexive demonstration of my freedom. I thought about that when the laughter began at Columbia University on Sept. 24. I wondered how quickly it took Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to realize they were laughing...
...political process to divergent voices, but surely never expected a voice as brash as Yeltsin's to carry so much popular weight. Nothing if not spontaneous, Yeltsin demanded on live television last month that Gorbachev resign. Only a few short years ago, he would have landed in the Gulag for such an attack on the leader of the Soviet Union. Today a verbal assault on Yeltsin by Gorbachev's allies only seems to increase the Russian leader's standing among the people...
...slept together around her on the floor," he wrote. Another of his early memories was the arrest of his father and uncle on charges of "anti-Soviet agitation" during a wave of Stalinist terror in 1934. The experience - the men spent three years in the Gulag - seemed not to dampen a rebellious streak that showed early in his life. Yeltsin recounted several occasions on which he was disciplined in school for fighting or for organizing pranks, once persuading all the students in his classroom to climb out a window and run away from a teacher they disliked. Another time...
...This is not to say that people haven’t been supportive, but not enough to change the history in 106 years,” Schwartz said. “The design school is like a gulag, nobody’s quite sure what’s going on there, but there are still people in there, human beings...
...Still, there isn't much the West can or will do about it. Relations between Moscow and the West have rarely hinged on single, or even systematic, human rights abuses. It was not expedient for the democracies to admit the existence of Stalin's Gulag when the priority was working together to defeat Hitler. It may be no more expedient to focus on human rights issues in Putin's Russia as long as Moscow must be kept as an ally in the war on terror, and persuaded to back sanctions against Iran...