Word: russians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...younger Sinyavsky's preparations for an uncertain future were plodding by comparison. After World War II, he studied Russian literature at Moscow State University. During the early '50s he held a research job at the Gorky Institute of World Literature. But then, in 1956, the scholar-critic secretly wrote his fanciful Tertz stories, which were published abroad in 1959. It took five more years before the authorities discovered Tertz's real identity, arrested Sinyavsky and made him the first Soviet writer imprisoned for expressing opinions through fictional characters...
...bootlegging facts in the diplomatic pouch of fiction, Sinyavsky demonstrates the range of his virtuosity and literary cunning by echoing some Russian masters: Gogol of the satiric Dead Souls, Dostoyevsky of the subversive Notes from Underground, Turgenev of the pastoral Fathers and Sons, Nabokov of the evocative Speak, Memory. It is a special tradition, one in which publish or perish could have just as easily meant publish and perish...
...bizarre patchwork quilt: hard- line trade unionists and factory workers from groups like the United Worker's Front who oppose a "return to capitalism"; military officials angered by plans to convert defense factories to civilian use; entrenched party apparatchiks who fear the loss of position and privileges; and Russian nationalists who hanker after the Czarist past, many of them aligned with the reactionary Pamyat (Memory) movement. Whatever their ideological differences, the conservatives are united by a concern that the reforms are moving too fast and bringing in alien Western ideas that are pushing the country toward a social breakdown...
...year is 1992. Gorbachev has been overthrown, and the Soviet empire has fallen apart. The Russian heartland is ruled by an ultra-nationalist military dictatorship, the Baltic republics by Catholic radicals, and Central Asia by fundamentalist emirates. Tanks patrol the streets of Moscow, and throughout the country a fearful, starving populace wreaks revenge on former Communist Party members, Jews and intellectuals...
...Soviet "right" engineered by the army, perhaps in conjunction with the KGB. Though many top Soviets -- including Yeltsin -- dismiss this scenario, Central Committee members voiced fears of a coup to Marshall Goldman, a leading American Sovietologist, last summer. The coup menace is exacerbated by the growing strength of Russian ultra-nationalist organizations. Extremist groups like Pamyat have targeted Jews (a paranoid Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theory), "intellectuals" and "Russophobes" as scapegoats for national decline. The nationalists are at heart anti-Communist, but their appeal overlaps with a growing blue-collar nostalgia for the despotic simplicities of the Stalinist...