Word: mikhail
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...Take Mikhail from St. Petersburg. A 42-year-old mathematician who taught in a high-level university for 18 years, he has been forced for the past year to sing for pennies on Jerusalem's pedestrian mall. Store-keepers shoo him away, passersby laugh at him. He cannot stand the shame of making a fool of himself before fellow Jews...
...that question might have seemed self-evident. After all, there was Boris Yeltsin, the first freely elected leader of Russia, addressing a joint session of Congress and seeming to wed his country rhetorically to the great Western traditions of democratic freedom. Just two months earlier, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was laying to rest the cold war at Fulton, Mo., the place where Winston Churchill declared it back in 1946. That vision must have disturbed many older- generation Soviets nurtured on the ideological red meat of East versus West, of a Soviet Russia saving the world from its capitalist original...
Yeltsin was surely aware that many Administration officials still tended to view him as a bumpkin and that he needed to overcome Washington's nostalgia for his sophisticated predecessor, Mikhail Gorbachev. He succeeded with a confident, bravura performance that became a personal triumph...
...very formidable, asking for questions ahead of time," she recalls of a 1969 interview. "But once I traveled to Switzerland and saw him in Montreux, he was whimsical and utterly charming." In the world of ballet, a specialty of Duffy's, Peter Martins was "candid to a fault," while Mikhail Baryshnikov often offered "poetic responses" to her questions. Perhaps Duffy's secret is that she notices and records the variety in this world exceptionally well...
...Staraya Ploshchad, a few blocks from the Kremlin. Seated in brown leather swivel chairs around a wooden table, the ruling Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union made its decisions to invade Afghanistan, reduce nuclear weapons, settle questions of Kremlin succession. It was in this room that Mikhail Gorbachev first discussed reform policies that would change the world and bring the U.S.S.R. to an end. Today the headquarters of the once powerful party belongs to Russia's new democratic leadership: Boris Yeltsin's team...