Word: kremlins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Kremlin, once the seat and symbol of absolute power, now has the air of a museum, a sprawling, drafty memento mori of the old regime. The long corridors are eerily silent; the guards seem listless. The nameplates on most doors have been removed. Many rooms are not just empty; they seem abandoned. Boris Yeltsin has moved in, but a number of his advisers have stayed behind at the Russian Parliament to massage legislators who are restless -- if not rebellious -- over the price their constituents are paying for reform...
...outgoing Carter Administration to send secret messages to Leonid Brezhnev informing him that among the costs of an invasion would be the sale of sophisticated U.S. weapons to China. This time, Kuklinski reported to Washington, Brezhnev had grown more impatient, and a disastrous harvest at home meant that the Kremlin did not need mechanized army units to help bring in the crops and instead could spare them for an invasion. "Anything that we knew that we thought the Pope would not be aware of, we certainly brought it to his attention," says Reagan. "Immediately...
There were obviously differences among those cases. Castro had the backing of another, now deceased superpower. Ho was a nationalist waging a civil war, as well as a Kremlin ally waging an ideological one. Khomeini was the avatar of Islamic rage against the West. But they also had something in common: by dodging American bullets, sometimes literally, each enhanced his standing in various quarters of the Third World...
...decades the Kremlin kept all air and rail transport in the U.S.S.R. on "Moscow time." Trains and planes arrived in and departed from the farthest reaches of an empire that sprawled over 11 time zones as if everything took place in the capital. Last week decommunized Moscow moved its clocks ahead one hour in a bid to save energy, but the other republics refused to follow. Result: mass confusion...
Sometimes the communist rulers revised their pantheon of heroes and cities as politics changed: Stalingrad, originally Czaritsin, became Volgograd after Joseph Stalin's crimes were made public in the 1960s. (Another Soviet joke: After the change from Stalingrad was announced, the Kremlin supposedly received a cable that read, I CONCUR WITH THE CRITICISM OF THE COMRADES. SIGNED: JOSEPH VOLGIN...