Word: leningrader
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Even more remarkable was that Natalia Makarova was dancing Giselle with an American company at all. Only four months ago she was a leading ballerina in Leningrad's famed Kirov Ballet, delighting audiences during the company's guest appearance in London. Then, suddenly, she became the most spectacular cultural defector since Nureyev 91 years ago. In seniority, anyway, she outranked him-making top money as an established star, with an apartment of her own and a servant. But unlike Nureyev, she had chosen to come to the U.S. and join an American company precisely to do the adventurous...
...have him confessing he's the King of England." In later years, says Khrushchev, even Stalin grew to fear his fellow Georgian and the power he wielded as absolute master of the vast Cheka, or secret-police, organization. The sweeping postwar purge of the Leningrad party, Khrushchev believes, was part of a scheme masterminded by Beria and his "battering ram," former Premier Georgy Malenkov; the object was to wreck the careers of a troika of promising young men whom they regarded as a threat to their own eventual ascendancy. Two of those men, N.A. Voznesensky and A.A. Kuznetsov, were...
Doctors' Plot. Stalin's growing derangement resulted in the "cruel and contemptible" affair called the Doctors' Plot. Khrushchev traces its beginning to a letter charging that Andrei Zhdanov, the Leningrad party boss, had been murdered by his physicians. Western experts have explained the plot as a calculated effort by Stalin to destroy Beria, whose security men would presumably have to be part of the scheme. In any case, Stalin ordered many doctors, particularly those who were treating Kremlin officials, arrested and mercilessly interrogated. Two were tortured to death, and the number would surely have risen had Stalin...
...effort to build a buffer for Leningrad, the Soviet Union's second largest city, Stalin at that time demanded that Finland move its southern border to the north, beyond artillery range of the city. The Finns refused, and Stalin decided to use force. "The Finns turned out to be good warriors," says Khrushchev. "We soon realized that we had bitten off more than we could chew. The Finns would climb up into the fir trees and shoot our men at pointblank range. Covered by branches, with white cloaks over their uniforms, the Finns were invisible...
Khrushchev recalls another telephone call, informing him of the 1934 murder of Leningrad Party Chief Sergei Kirov by a Trotskyite dissident. It was that event that set the stage for one of the most terrifying eras of modern history: the Great Purges of the 1930s, or, as Khrushchev calls them, "the meat mincer." The NKVD, Stalin's secret police and precursor of today's KGB, suddenly became all-powerful, and thousands of party officials and army officers began to vanish. Khrushchev survived the grim era in willing ignorance. "I don't know where these people were sent...