Word: russia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Wretched and abundant, Oppressed and powerful, Weak and mighty, Mother Russia! ?Nikolai Nekrasov, Who Can Be Happy in Russia...
This fact reinforces the average Soviet citizen's patriotism, even if he is otherwise apolitical. Says Harvard's Ulam: "The Soviet patriot believes that the function of the state is to be as powerful as possible. He remembers that tsarist Russia was defeated in World War I; now his country is one of the two greatest influences in the entire world. This is a sort of surrogate for his sufferings. Whatever else it has done to him, Communism has made Russia a much more powerful country...
...their hankering after order and continuity, the Russians have surprised the world, and themselves, before. They could do so again. It was in the context of an admission of his inability to "forecast to you the actions" of the U.S.S.R. that Winston Churchill made his famous statement in 1939: "Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Less well remembered but equally trenchant was what he said next: "But perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest." Four decades later, the U.S.S.R. is still enigmatic, even?perhaps especially?to itself; and it is still...
...recent article in Foreign Affairs, Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes from his exile in Vermont how a peasant family in the middle of Russia wants simply to be left alone: "If only the petty local Communist despot would somehow quit his uncontrolled tyranny, if only they could get enough to eat for once, and buy shoes for the children, and lay in enough fuel for the winter, if only they could have sufficient space to live even two to a room...
...original Russian title of Solzhenitsyn's memoir is The Calf Kept Butting the Oak. The English equivalent of this Russian proverbial saying is "beating one's head against a stone wall." Russia is a land of proverbs. One that could apply to all of Solzhenitsyn's writings: "What has been written with a pen cannot be hacked away with an ax " - Patricia Blake