Word: russia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...68th year, modern Russia's greatest humanist and libertarian died in the way that most befitted his life -- in the midst of combat for his country's freedoms. He had spent the day of Dec. 14 at a tempestuous meeting of the Interregional Group, a coalition of liberal members of the Congress of People's Deputies that he had helped found. Exhorting, cajoling and arguing with his colleagues, he pressed for the establishment of an alternative political party in opposition to the Communists. Witnesses were shocked at how dramatically Sakharov had aged lately, as he made his faltering...
...19th century the great powers opposed the upsurge of democracy. Czar Nicholas I of Russia, for example, sent an army to Hungary to crush the revolt there. By contrast, this year's revolutionaries have had the tacit blessing, and sometimes the explicit encouragement, of the Czar's successor as the most powerful man in Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev. By what he has done -- and, perhaps more important, by what he has refrained from doing -- the Soviet leader has made possible the astonishing events of this year...
...days of Czar Nicholas II. The TASS news agency reports with a straight face that aliens stepped out of UFOs in Voronezh. On TV, psychic healers appear frequently with supposed cures for everything from obesity to detached retinas. As in all periods of great stress, the Christian churches in Russia have seldom been fuller...
...Gorbachev "for real"? Let us look again at the editorial page of the New York Times: "One week ago Russia came of age. She allowed her people all the fun and trappings of a real election -- voting not publicly by show of hands but in private in red-curtained booths behind closed doors." Most people would assume that editorial had been written about Gorbachev's Russia in 1989. In fact, it was written about Stalin's Russia in the 1930s. Gorbachev is certainly not a Stalinist, but he is also just as certainly not a Jeffersonian democrat. We should examine...
Fantasy Furniture by Bruce M. Newman (Rizzoli; $50). A mythological mahogany bird to cradle an infant in 19th century Russia; jolly Black Forest bears to serve as chair-backs; gilded Venetian settees with shell motifs to turn salons into grottoes: thus did the dreams of burghers and kings like Bavaria's mad Ludwig II make chimeras real...