Word: nikolais
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...income up 7.2%, industrial production up 8.3%). The 1,510-odd delegates were visibly unimpressed. Instead, they complained bitterly about the shoddy quality of Soviet housing and the poor reliability of farm machinery, which plagues farmers with frequent breakdowns. As Kosygin and Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev looked on, Chairman Nikolai Baibakov, of the State Planning Committee, assured the angry delegates that he would take immediate action to correct those deficiencies. Obviously, if the Russians want to upgrade their consumer and industrial goods, they cannot embark on the construction of a multibillion-dollar antimissile network throughout the country...
Wildly improbable as these goings-on may be, Novelist Stephen Jones has a gift for sweet and savage satire reminiscent of that unwholesome trio: Nikolai Gogol, Nathanael West and Samuel Beckett. His characters parody themselves in obsessive dead-end conversations, groping their way circularly past each other through muddled clouds of private thought and uncertain motive. In this first novel, his descriptions of hotels, restaurants, odd corners of small towns and the seedy people who inhabit them, haunt the mind's eye. Yet Jones' real talent is for making the improbable seem necessary and the grotesque plausibly humdrum...
...their fleet in the Mediterranean (see following story). "The Soviet Union is known to be a Black Sea and, hence, Mediterranean power," the government newspaper Izvestia proclaimed, declaring that Soviet ships were in the Mediterranean to stay. In Red Star, the organ of the Soviet Defense Ministry, Vice Admiral Nikolai Smirnov said it was "imperative for the Soviet Union, in the interests of security," to strengthen its fleet. The presence of Soviet ships in the Mediterranean, the admiral wrote, "does not allow the Sixth Fleet to carry out the Pentagon's designs with impunity and behave as unceremoniously...
...large Soviet garrison would leave little barracks space for the Czechoslovak army, Brezhnev replied: "We could use about 250,000 of your troops along the Chinese frontier." When Dubček tried to explain that his side had fulfilled the conditions of the first Moscow accord, Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny ordered him to shut up. The Russians told the Czechoslovaks not to hope that outrage among the free world's Communist parties would deter the Kremlin from cracking down harder on Czechoslovakia. In the words of one Russian, "For the next 30 or 40 years, socialism has no chance...
...first political show trial since Stalin's death took place in February of 1966. Two novelists, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, were charged with circulating "anti-Soviet" propaganda after they had sent their novels abroad to be published (under the pen names Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak). They were condemned, under Article 70 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Republic, for "dissemination of slanderous inventions" with the purpose of "subverting the Soviet regime." Since then, an even more general law has been passed removing the need to prove subversive purpose. Sinyavsky got seven years' hard labor, Daniel five. Their...