Word: nikolayevich
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Pick up an old novel by one of the Russian masters or a new memoir by a Soviet dissident and notice how people introduce themselves -- last names first. "Good day, I am Scriabin, Alexander Nikolayevich." Notice too how often, perhaps in rebellion against those cumbrous Russian patronymics, they use only their initials. "Good day, I am Scriabin, A.N." The title of a French movie made a few years back, Lacombe, Lucien, was apparently intended to show how the German Occupation had bureaucratized and dehumanized the susceptible French. But the Russians do not have their reversed names imposed on them; they...
Novelist Yuz Aleshkovsky, 54, views all forbidden topics as the domain of farce. The comic artist had to support himself in the Soviet Union writing children's books. Now he has returned to adult fiction with gusto. His raunchiest work, Nikolai Nikolayevich, is a Russian Portnoy's Complaint. In Aleshkovsky's book, as in Philip Roth's novel, the hero spends most of his time masturbating. The Russian, however, finds an ingenious way to turn his obsession into a cushy government job when a Soviet laboratory purchases his prodigious production of spermatozoa for the greater glory...
Tacked on to the end of a long-winded account in Pravda of the latest Central Committee meeting was a laconic one-line communique: "Comrade A.N. Shelepin has been relieved of his position as a Politburo member at his request." Thus did Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin, the Kremlin's star ascendant of the 1950s and '60s, plummet last week into the particular oblivion reserved for disgraced Soviet leaders. No one was fooled by the official contention that the most ambitious, the most artful and potentially the most powerful man in the U.S.S.R. had willingly relinquished his post...
...meeting between President Lyndon Baines Johnson and Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin had also been long in coming. Yet once started, the summiteers seemed as loath to end their dialogue as they had been to initiate it. For five hours and 20 minutes, at least two hours longer than expected, Johnson and Kosygin conferred on a wide spectrum of world issues that the superpowers alone can hope to resolve, interrupting private sessions monitored only by interpreters with a working luncheon attended by their top advisers. When they parted, it was not goodbye but au revoir; they surprised the world anew...
...Nikolai Nikolayevich Sukhanov was the first candid cameraman of the Russian Revolution: in seven volumes, he chronicled its events with movie vividness. As an original member of the Executive Committee of the first Soviet, he also co-directed the early scenes. Sukhanov was an economist, the editor (under Maxim Gorky) of the radical newspaper New Life, and a maverick Marxist. Although he himself knew almost everyone who made the revolution, he is today virtually forgotten except among professional historians. His seven-volume work was first published in 1922, but it has just now been pruned to a single volume...