Word: leningraders
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...innocents of The Winter Zoo are looking for pleasure, Vladimir Girshkin, the hero of Gary Shteyngart's first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, is after money. Girshkin isn't so much an expatriate but a repatriate--born in Leningrad and raised in New York City. Girshkin does a favor for a New York-based Russian mafioso, who pays him back by sending him to the East European city of Prava--read Prague--to run a pyramid scheme aimed at slumming young expats, the "pretty castoffs of well-to-do America, cruising along on their five-year plan of alcoholic...
...country's nuclear power plants may be just as porous. At the Leningrad facility near the Gulf of Finland, sources say vodka and drugs flow freely among the workers, most of whom earn barely 3,000 rubles a month--about $100. Poorly paid, highly inebriated men make a shabby line of defense against terrorists and traffickers. Vaclav Havlik, a Czech citizen who was part of a group of uranium smugglers arrested near Munich in 1994, told TIME that obtaining material from Russia was no great chore. "It was like going for vacation by the sea and bringing back a sack...
...Kerimov is, like Putin, a graduate of Leningrad University. He and his colleagues are hardly wild-eyed secessionists. "I hated Maskhadov, Basayev, Khattab," he said, referring to Aslan Maskhadov, the President of independent Chechnya, and his most controversial commanders. "Now I am ready to pray to them." Other lecturers just want to leave. In 1944 the Soviets deported all Chechens to Central Asia. Thousands died, and the survivors were allowed home only in 1957. This time, said Kerimov's colleague Said Yushaev, the Russians want to force Chechens to go, "like the [Jewish] diaspora...
Schuller originally played the flute, but switched to the French horn at age 14. Two years later he made his debut when the New York Philharmonic hired him as an extra horn player in the legendary premiere of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony, conducted by Arturo Toscanini. The precocious musician was then hired at the tender age of 17 as principal horn of the Cincinnati Symphony. The orchestra's music director, Eugene Goossens, was a major influence. "He was a great mentor, and he supported my composing. He arranged for my professional debut as a composer, when he arranged...
Yuri Kobaladze, a onetime KGB general turned businessman, says Putin's life changed when he bumped into former Leningrad law lecturer Anatoli Sobchak in a corridor early in 1990. Sobchak asked what he was doing. "I'm doing nothing," Putin replied. "My career's not a success because they told me to come back here. I have nothing to do here." "Join me," said Sobchak. Sobchak was dazzling the city with his promises of democracy and reform. Putin was ready to make a "real break," says a close Putin aide. "People had the feeling Sobchak was someone they could...