Word: peasant
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...last, a dilapidated bus drove into the embassy compound and backed up to the lunchroom door. With it came Soviet Foreign Ministry agents, who urged the peasants to come along quietly. "Come now, let's not have a demonstration," said one. "Where will you take us?" a Siberian inquired. "To a hotel," replied the official. "Then we will arrange for you to go back home." By then, the women were wailing. One peasant yelled, "But I do not want to go back! They will arrest me and shoot me!" To a cluster of newsmen standing near by, he cried...
When they returned home, they organized a peasant movement independent of the country's political parties. The movement grew until, in 1952, it deposed a "tottering and defecting" military junta...
Turmoil & Calm. The Barbizon artist most misunderstood in later years was Jean François Millet, whose studies of peasants, notably The Angelus and The Man with a Hoe, splashed him with a reputation for sentimentality. Millet himself protested that he could not understand how anybody could consider the French peasant "jolly," and today, seen afresh, the paintings justify his protests. He painted his peasants with brooding compassion, saw in them "true humanity, the great poetry," but the mood is somber rather than sentimental. They bend to their labors patiently but also hopelessly, condemned to struggle against stubborn nature...
...play is based on the "Clerk's Tale" in Chaucer. "A nobleman marries a simple peasant girl, and then tests her faithfulness by a series of tricks," Babe explained last night. "He takes away her two children, claims that because of the difference in their stations he cannot remain married to her, and so on, but she is unwilling to leave him. Chaucer has a happy ending, with a reunion. It doesn't quite happen that way in my version...
Herring & Hot Plates. This year's crop of Americans in Russia comes from campuses as diverse as Berkeley and Emory. Most students are in their early 30s; all speak Russian. Topics of study tend to be esoteric: Russian comment on the French Encyclopedist Diderot, peasant self-government after the emancipation of the serfs, the attitude of the Czarist gentry to peasant reform. The predominant hoariness of the subjects is partly a result of Russian reluctance to open archives on recent events, for in Soviet practice, as one American put it, "What is history today may be non-history tomorrow...