Word: russian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Sakharov was an honest man who was killed many times," said Vitali Korotich, editor of the liberal weekly Ogonyok. The saga of the deathblows inflicted upon Sakharov and his subsequent resurrection reads like a gripping secular sequel to the Russian Orthodox Lives of the Saints. Sakharov had certainly not been expected to survive the frightful ordeal that began in the mid-1970s, when he was targeted by the regime of Leonid Brezhnev as the nation's most dangerous dissident. Vilification in the press, together with threats of imprisonment and assassination, was a common occurrence...
...naturally to Sakharov that it heartened others. Dressed in a worn suit and bedroom slippers, the tall, perpetually bent-over man with shy eyes displayed a lion's boldness when defying the Kremlin. Mocking his own quixotic ways, he once dubbed himself Andrei the Blessed, an honorific that in Russian connotes a kind of holy innocence. Said computer scientist Valentin Turchin, a fellow dissident who emigrated to the U.S.: "There are two categories of people who have left their imprint on humanity: leaders and saints. Sakharov was in the category of saints." One mournful colleague in Moscow summoned...
...Soviet Union go wrong, which they could, I don't think we'll see a return to an assertive, confident, Stalinist renewal. Instead, we'll probably see a turn toward some highly nationalistic form of dictatorship, perhaps what I call a "Holy Alliance" between the Soviet Army and the Russian Orthodox Church, galvanized by a sense of desperate Great Russian nationalism. That would then produce even more intense reactions from non-Russians. It could be a very ugly picture...
...with some new form of associated statehood for the Baltic republics. Georgia and some of the other more nationally defined republics could enjoy a much more independent status within the Soviet confederation. If they don't have that, then they will have to have some form of Great Russian nationalist dictatorship. I think Gorbachev is trying to persuade the non-Russian nations that they have to accept some form of yet undefined pluralism as the only alternative...
...economists say we have yet to hit the bottom. The people are acutely aware of the gap between words and deeds by the government. We feel we might be entering a period of chaos." Already, Migranyan warned, a loose coalition of forces -- disgruntled members of labor bureaucracies, ethnic Russian nationalists and members of the Communist elite, or nomenklatura -- can be discerned that might eventually seek Gorbachev's overthrow. "The longer Gorbachev's reforms are stuck," said the Soviet analyst, "the greater the opportunity for his adversaries to organize against...