Word: russian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Unlike the average American family in the Soviet Union, which retreats into its own artificial Western womb, the Schecter family tried to immerse itself in Soviet life as fully as possible. Now six years later, reclining leisurely in his Claverly suite and surrounded by posters of Lenin and other Russian souvenirs, Steve Schecter reminisces about his days in Moscow...
...Soviet standards, which seem to newly-arrived Americans, Spartan, the Schecters had a luxurious apartment. Workers knocked out a wall between two rooms to give them a gigantic living room stretching from one end of the building to the other. Russian apartments rarely have rooms this large because the country has a severe shortage of apartment space, and most families in Russia must place their children in generally small living rooms. Sometimes as many as four families will share a communal apartment...
...part of their attempt to blend into Soviet society as much as possible, the Schecters sent their children to an ordinary Soviet school. For their first few weeks there, the children relied on the Russian they had learned in an intensive course that the entire family had taken before arriving in Moscow. "The only problem at first was that we stood out as foreigners because we arrived at school every morning in our Volvo station wagon, which was one of maybe two in all of Moscow. Everyone would stare at us--it was very embarrassing. But after a while...
Schecter says that his Russian friends reacted to him in different ways. "some were just after the novelties of your life-style," he notes, "such as bubble gum, foreign stamps, and felt-tip pens. Or listening to music and bumming Marlboros off you. It was t(ose kinds of people we ended up parting with, because they weren't true friends. You tolerate this at first because you want to meet people and learn about them." He says that those who remained his friends, although originally attracted to him and the other Schecter sibs by their American luxuries, "weren...
...rejected their programs. According to this argument, the Communists in Europe have clung to power illegally only when the Soviet army was at the border, ready to enforce a coup with armed might. But there is always the possibility that a Communist government in Western Europe might not need Russian help if it had firm control of the country's police and internal security forces and key segments of the armed forces...