Word: motherland
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...want to be a PLA woman to safeguard our motherland," said the third, the one who'd looked amused. So it was clearer than ever how little I knew; because in a battle between her and the vice political commissar, how could I tell who would win, or whether it would even be a contest? All I could tell for sure is that once in a while, now, I miss Shanghai, where the lights stretch on for miles at night but it feels as though everyone knows everyone else. So I guess that will have...
...country, are the "others" who can intimidate the leadership? They are the military. I don't reproach the military for that-they're only doing their job. The military is made up of men who are ready to sacrifice their lives for the sake of their motherland. However, leaders must be careful not to look at the world through the eyeglasses of the military. Otherwise, the picture will appear terribly gloomy; the government will start spending all its money and the best energies of its people on armaments-with the result that pretty soon the country will have...
Solzhenitsyn regards the brutal fate of these returned P.O.W.s as one of the most frightful of Stalin's crimes. "They were called traitors, " he writes of them, "but they did not betray the motherland. The motherland betrayed them, and betrayed them three times." The first betrayal was Stalin's bumbling strategy, which nearly lost the war and allowed the Germans to capture vast numbers of prisoners. Then these Soviet P.O.W.s were virtually abandoned by Stalin and left to die in Nazi camps. Finally the survivors were lured home by the oft-repeated promise of forgiveness...
...write history. "My object," he declares, "is to examine the social reasons for this unheard-of phenomenon: that several hundred thousand young people took up arms against their mother country on the side of her worst enemy. We must consider who was to blame?these young people or the motherland. You cannot explain it by some inborn biological instinct for treachery...
...cold fascination in learning that Glavlit-the machinery of hacks that controls censorship-could overrule even First Secretary Khrushchev about what should be published. More recently, Novelist Mikhail Sholokhov (Quiet Flows the Don) had to delete a chapter from a new novel called They Fought for the Motherland at the censors' insistence because it dealt with prison-camp tortures. In its place, Sholokhov substituted a discussion of fishing techniques...