Word: kazakstan
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Under the sign of their rubber stamp Crocodile editors began to write the heads of Soviet iron-using trusts that a great meteorite, rich in iron, aluminum and even platinum, was due to drop soon near a non-existent city in Kazakstan. They intended, they said, to be on the spot. Their Trust was open for iron orders. Man after head man swallowed the bait, wrote back for details which the editors gleefully supplied as their sole stock-in-trade. Finally even the great Scrap Iron Trust gave them an order on the Trust's Kazakstan representative...
...ideas were popping into the editors' heads by the dozen. They dropped a few clues by signing their letters with the name of a famed Soviet comic character, "O. Bender," and with "William Tell, Trust Secretary." To soften the hardships of their Kazakstan expedition, they got special rates on extra food, phonographs, records, banjos and guitars. Then they asked the Scrap Iron Trust for 10,000 rubles for the expedition. The Trust passed them on to Constantine Maltsev, Assistant Commissar for Education. He, for one, did not bite, did not laugh. Instead he called the OGPU. One editor, arrested...
...floor, grabbed the crust and devoured it. The same performance was repeated later with an orange peel. Even transport and G. P. U. officers warned me against traveling over the countryside at night because of the numbers of starving, desperate men. . . . A foreign expert who returned from Kazakstan told me that 1,000,000 of the 5,000,000 of inhabitants there have died of hunger...