Word: russias
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Patience will crack a rock," the old folk saying goes. Three hundred years under the Tatars and 300 years under the Romanovs developed both heroic patience, which erupted into popular revolts, and servile patience, or priterpelost. Russia was the last European country to free its serfs, and plunged into socialism directly from sovereign feudalism, almost completely bypassing the experience of bourgeois democracy. The bedbugs of feudalism and servility moved inside wooden trunks from village huts into communal apartments. Many bosses behaved like "Red feudal lords," taking away not only the peasants' land but their passports too -- and that really smacked...
...great prison memoirs spawned by Russia's cruel history are alike in essence. From Dostoyevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead to Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and now Natan Sharansky's Fear No Evil, they reveal a world of unrelenting human degradation: the bestiality of the jailers, the dog-eat-dog struggle among the prisoners, the treachery of the informers. Each account evokes the stench, the rattle of fetters, the heart-stopping cold, the killing hard labor. Still, each author used different stratagems to survive, to prevail as a human being and, ultimately, to bear witness...
...interested in Russian politics from the German view," she continues, adding, "I wanted to study Russia to get a better understanding of international politics...
...Brezhnev's Soviet Union, like Stalin's, would not feel entirely secure until all other nations felt entirely insecure. Predatory or paranoid, the old men in the Kremlin seemed determined to continue playing the "Great Game" much as Rudyard Kipling had described it a hundred years before, when Czarist Russia and the British Raj maneuvered for influence among the tribes of the Hindu Kush...
...there is pain in the pullout, there can also be gain. Even before the retreat began, the Soviet leader and his spokesmen were using it as Exhibit A in a campaign to convince international public opinion that the U.S.S.R. now has a more benign foreign policy. "Even the professional Russia-haters must now admit that things have changed, and they've changed for the better," says Georgi Arbatov, the Kremlin's best- known America watcher. "We are going to do something terrible to you -- we are going to deprive you of an enemy." Gorbachev would have the world believe...