Word: pavelic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sign that Russia is now pushing to end what has become a quagmire. But a speedy end to the fighting would come despite fierce Chechen resistance, overwhelming domestic opposition and turmoil in the Russian military command. Several Russian generals have disobeyed orders or sharply criticized Defense Minister Pavel Grachev's military strategy. (One field commander refused to advance on Grozny or fire on civilians.) Today, according to a Tass report denied by the government, Grachev dismissed three top generals, accepted the resignation of another and took personal command of military operations in Chechnya...
When Defense Minister Pavel Grachev appeared before the Russian parliament two weeks ago, everyone expected that his visit would be the political equivalent of a burning at the stake. His numerous critics were eager to toss a branch onto the fire that seemed about to consume the career of the 46-year- old paratroop veteran of the Afghan War who was promoted to Defense Minister three years ago. As the general who oversaw the final withdrawal of his country's army from eastern Germany last August -- an exercise most Russian soldiers still find humiliating -- Grachev has become the embodiment...
...Coetzee's darkly convincing narration, Dostoyevsky hears that his 21- year-old stepson Pavel Isaev, who has fallen in with nihilists in Petersburg, has been murdered, perhaps by the police or by his comrades. The writer travels to Petersburg, finds the rooming house where Pavel had lived and -- guilt-haunted because he did not get along well with this difficult son of his dead first wife -- moodily retraces the young man's last months. He tries to retrieve Pavel's papers from the police and is subjected to repeated, insinuating interrogations. He encounters a deadly, contemptuous young nihilist named Nechaev...
...Coetzee sums things up. But there are some facts the typical reader may not know that he ought to: in real life Dostoyevsky did not travel to Petersburg in 1869; he remained in Dresden. His stepson Pavel was not murdered by nihilists or anyone else. A pest and a spendthrift, he tormented the author all his life, and a standard scene from biographies has Pavel being forcibly kept from Dostoyevsky's deathbed. Nechaev did exist, and Dostoyevsky did transform him into a character in Demons, but the student his gang murdered in a celebrated crime was one Ivan Ivanov. Coetzee...
...banks, hoping to cripple the criminal gangs. In the meantime, citizens are afraid to go out at night; stores have difficulty keeping pistols, Mace and bulletproof jackets in stock; dinner conversations stop abruptly whenever a tail pipe backfires in the streets. "The crime problem today knows no limits," says Pavel Gusev, editor in chief of Moskovsky Komsomolets, who travels with a bodyguard. "In the U.S. your Mafia has already divided up spheres of business, so the bosses no longer kill each other off. Here we have a wild market where state holdings are being turned over into private hands...