Word: kgb
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...testing and encourage multilateral disarmament, for which he won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize. But he was best known as the indefatigable champion of the dissident, the downtrodden and the persecuted in his country. It was in this role that he incurred the deadly wrath of Brezhnev and the KGB. In the decade before Sakharov's banishment to Gorky, his two-room apartment was a haven for men and women who had fallen afoul of Soviet totalitarianism. Sitting at his enamel-top kitchen table, drinking apple-flavored tea, he dispensed precious counsel and gifts of money to an endless stream...
These and other episodes are presented out of order because, writes Sinyavsky, "the past cannot be grasped in sequence." Realism, too, is all thumbs. In order to re-create the bizarre atmosphere of his KGB interrogation, the author restages the experience as a one-act farce. Karl could have been one of the Marx Brothers. Some typical dialogue between writer and inquisitor...
...dictator's toxic phantom pervades the book, which is the literary incarnation of Sinyavsky's public and private life. He admits that in 1948 he was asked by agents of the KGB to woo a fellow student, the daughter of a French naval attache. He complied without knowing their purpose or even the extent of his own motives. Years later, Sinyavsky put the intrigue to good use by enlisting the Frenchwoman to help smuggle his writings to the West...
...silent demonstration on Dec. 5, Constitution Day. I decided to attend. In Pushkin Square I found a few dozen people standing around the statue. At 6 o'clock, half of those present, myself included, removed our hats and stood in silence. (The other half, I later realized, were KGB.) After a minute or so I walked over to the monument and read the inscription aloud...
...second scenario of Soviet catastrophe is a coup from the Soviet "right" engineered by the army, perhaps in conjunction with the KGB. Though many top Soviets -- including Yeltsin -- dismiss this scenario, Central Committee members voiced fears of a coup to Marshall Goldman, a leading American Sovietologist, last summer. The coup menace is exacerbated by the growing strength of Russian ultra-nationalist organizations. Extremist groups like Pamyat have targeted Jews (a paranoid Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theory), "intellectuals" and "Russophobes" as scapegoats for national decline. The nationalists are at heart anti-Communist, but their appeal overlaps with a growing blue-collar nostalgia...