Word: pyotr
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...member of the Soviet establishment who falls from favor usually loses his dacha. When a top Moscow scientist recently applied for permission to emigrate to Israel, his country house was the first privilege to be taken away from him. These days dacha watchers are wondering if Pyotr Shelest, recently deposed as first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, will be able to hang on to his spacious villa and mile-long private beach on the Black Sea coast...
...hope that after the President's visit there will be no more political arrests," said Soviet Historian Pyotr Yakir on the eve of Richard Nixon's arrival in Moscow for the summit meeting. "It is time to end the Middle Ages." Last week plainclothes officers of the KGB (secret police) burst into Yakir's apartment, hustled him into a black Volga sedan, and took him to Lefortovo Prison, where he faces charges of passing information to the West about dissent in the Soviet Union...
Yakir practically grew up in Stalinist concentration camps. At the age of 14, he was swept up in the mass arrests of 1937, the year his father, Major General lona Yakir, was executed during Joseph Stalin's purge of the Red Army. Pyotr Yakir was released after 17 years and rehabilitated as part of Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign in 1956. It is rare-and therefore especially ominous-for the Soviet authorities to rearrest a former inmate of a Stalinist labor camp...
Brezhnev's problems may be more complicated. He will be strengthened against the Kremlin hard-liners who oppose his policy of detente. Not wasting any time, he demoted Pyotr Shelest before the summit began. As the party chief of the Ukraine, Shelest had once crushed an apple in his hand to demonstrate how he thought Czechoslovakia should be treated. He is said to have consistently opposed any steps toward coming to terms with the U.S. and he reportedly urged military action to break the blockade of North Viet Nam. He opposed Brezhnev on domestic matters as well...
Medvedev was released only after his twin brother, Roy, an eminent historian, mobilized a protest by a group of internationally renowned writers and scientists, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Physicists Andrei Sakharov and Pyotr Kapitsa, and Mstislav Keldysh, president of the Academy of Sciences. Last summer, in an attempt to hush up the embarrassing affair, the KGB (Soviet secret police) promised the Medvedevs that they would "close the case" and asked for assurances that the brothers would not write about what had happened. Roy Medvedev agreed, on the condition that there be no more "psychiatric blackmail...