Word: lubyanka
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...request that was virtually identical in its absurdity and moral bankruptcy. On September 13, Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov called for restoring the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, which is currently lying in a park next to other Communist-era sculptures, to its former place in the city’s Lubyanka Square. This immediately set off a wave of protests from outraged citizens, the Russian Orthodox Church, various human rights organizations and members of Russia’s parliament. Dzerzhinsky, you see, was to Soviet mass violence what Goering and Heinrich Himmler were to the Nazi Holocaust. After...
...RAOUL WALLENBERG, Swedish diplomat imprisoned in Moscow in 1945; by Russian investigators. After saving at least 20,000 Hungarian Jews from Nazi death camps by issuing them Swedish passports, Wallenberg was arrested in Budapest by the Soviets. Russian officials had maintained that he died of a heart attack in Lubyanka prison in 1947. They now admit he probably was murdered...
Lourie's Stalin enjoys the occasional note of totalitarian whimsy, as when, late one night, he rides back to the Kremlin from Lubyanka in his limousine, accompanied by "Boss Two," the near identical double who stood in for him at risky public appearances. Stalin has the limo stop alongside a drunk, rolls down the window and lets the drunk see...twin Stalins! "Drink a little less," Uncle Joe advises, and the limo roars off. This Stalin takes in the world with a savage candor. At a meeting with his hatchetman Lavrenty Beria, "I caught a whiff of that hideous cologne...
...soldiers haven't been paid in months). The plan is to get a little back from the foreign spy agencies who have swooped into Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union, scooping up precious military secrets from Russians for a song. So far, the boys working the Lubyanka hotline say the response has been fantastic. Several hundred "interesting" phone calls (as well as a few "psychologically abnormal" ones) have poured in since Nikolai Kovalyov, head of the KGB's successor, the Federal Security Service, went public in a recent televised appeal...
...much honor and prestige. Such confidence has not always been justified: Russian intellectuals may like to view themselves as social oracles, but they have never been particularly good at predicting the future. Many of the intelligentsia who welcomed the 1917 Revolution became its first victims in the cellars of Lubyanka prison. Today they face a different kind of crisis in the aftermath of the democratic revolution: they are in danger of becoming irrelevant in a society where commerce is winning out over culture...