Word: medvedevs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...literature of the Soviet Union's political dissidents continues to crowd the imagination like a 19th century novel. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov echo in the dramatic testimony of Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky, Daniel, Sakharov, Medvedev and Mandelshtam. Vladimir Bukovsky's To Build a Castle adds the spirit of Lewis Carroll. His Soviet Union seems like a vertiginous rabbit hole lined in permafrost, or the other side of the looking glass, where the Red kings and queens of the Kremlin can sometimes be made to play by the rules...
...early 1960s, Lysenko found a new patron in Nikita Khrushchev, who was desperately eager to overtake American agriculture. But Lysenko's star was already dimming. From the West came word of spectacular new advances in genetics. Lysenko's reputation was also undermined by Soviet geneticist Zhores Medvedev's samizdat (underground book) The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, which documented Lysenko's falsification of data and character assassination. Finally, when Khrushchev fell -in part because of his disastrous farm policies-so did Lysenko. The onetime czar of Soviet agriculture spent his declining years at a research...
...scientists have been able to prove the claimed ages of the centenarians or satisfactorily explain longevity among such widely dispersed peoples, says Medvedev. He methodically ticks off each suggested cause. It is not mountain air, because many of the oldsters live at sea level. Nor is it temperature, because some live in torrid and others in frigid zones. Diet varies radically. Some of the people studied subsist on what heart specialists would consider healthful fare while others consume great quantities of fats and wine...
...Soviets' Methuselah cult is explainable in social and political rather than medical terms, says Medvedev. In the hotbeds of centenarianism, the aged are venerated and may even have postage stamps issued in their honor. The cult's prominence in Georgia was fostered by Georgian-born Stalin, who apparently began to hope, at around age 70, that longevity might...
...Medvedev's most compelling explanation: hundreds of thousands of draft dodgers and deserters during World War I and subsequent civil warfare got themselves false papers to greatly exaggerate their age. There is one authenticated case of a man who was lionized in the Soviet press as having reached the age of 128, then exposed as being only 78. In the U.S.S.R., as elsewhere, there is no fountain of youth...