Word: revealing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...desire is to hope for the best; the necessity is to expect the worst. Yet, since the Soviet Union remains a closed gate, both forms of anticipation reveal more of ourselves than of the Soviets. For nearly half a century, the West has been a people of gate watchers in regard to the Soviet Union. Once more we address our questions to the gatekeeper: Does his relative youth signal flexibility or merely a longer reign of adamancy? Does his background in agriculture suggest less emphasis on the military? Is this changing of the guard merely plus ca change...
Throughout this ritual, the gate remains closed, as it has always been closed, from the days before the Czars through a history that owes little to the West. As for the new gatekeeper, he will reveal himself when he and the state from which he is inseparable are ready. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov tells of awakening mornings in the Russia of his boyhood and glancing at the chink between the white shutters to see what the new day proffered: gloom or "dewy ( brilliancy." The West has no shutters it can open, and the glimpses it gets show almost nothing. This...
Such incidents are being closely examined for what they reveal about Gorbachev, a stocky, balding man with a wine-colored birthmark on his forehead.* Trained as a lawyer, he is the first Soviet leader born after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the best educated since Lenin. His speech underscores his upbringing: his mastery of Russian grammar is superior to that of most of his Kremlin predecessors. He is the exemplar of the New Guard, which represents a generation raised after the Stalinist horrors and for which the catastrophe of World War II is an adolescent memory. Though much about Gorbachev...
...wiretap on the telephone at Masselli's Bronx meat-packing warehouse. In 1981, after Donovan had faced confirmation by the Senate as Labor Secretary, the FBI advised the lawmakers about his alleged organized crime connections but for some reason did not mention the incriminating wiretap. Nor did the FBI reveal that it was aware, as the Senate considered Donovan's qualifications, that "possibly fraudulent schemes" to hike minority participation in the Schiavone subway work had been disclosed by the recorded conversations. The bureau failed to act then on the evidence that, more than three years later, produced Merola's indictment...
Admittedly, A Private Function does not reveal anything new and different about the English aristocracy. The film is different because it immerses the viewer in the bowels of society so suitably that he does not feel unclean himself. Bennett's low-key attitude keeps the film from rising above the level of an average Monty Python episode, but when compared with lawdry American attempts like wild Life and Arenging Angel, A Private Function almost deserves its royal welcome...