Word: russias
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When Roy Medvedev's momentous study of Stalinism, Let History Judge, was first published in the West in 1971, readers marveled. How could a Soviet citizen, laboring in Russia, have produced a work so rich in documentation, so scrupulous as scholarship and, above all, so harrowingly vivid in its recounting of the calamities inflicted by Stalin on his country? In the West there was nothing to rival it in scope. In the Soviet Union, where the book circulated among scholars, it restored a long-abandoned standard of professional integrity to Soviet historiography. As one Russian practitioner lamented, "Stalin beat...
...RUSSIA HOUSE by John le Carre (Knopf; $19.95). A document discounting Soviet missile capabilities is smuggled to the West. Never mind glasnost, perestroika and the cold war thaw. Are these grubby notebooks full of facts and figures true? The quest for the answer produces the author's most hair- raising thriller since The Spy Who Came In from the Cold...
...RUSSIA HOUSE by John le Carre (Knopf; $19.95). A document discounting Soviet missile capabilities is smuggled to the West. Never mind glasnost, perestroika and the cold war thaw. Are these grubby notebooks full of facts and figures true? The quest for the answer produces the author's most hair- raising thriller since The Spy Who Came In from the Cold...
Frazier tells us that tumbleweed came from Russia, that Nicodemus, Kans. (pop. 50), was founded by black settlers in 1877, that during the dust-bowl years of the mid-'30s storms called "dusters" were identified by color -- brown from Kansas, red from Oklahoma, dirty yellow from Texas and New Mexico. He relates that in 1910 C.W. Post, the cereal magnate, tried to produce rain at Post City, Texas, by blowing up boxcarloads of dynamite. He had enough success, or at least enough coincidental rain, to be encouraged. Frazier is fascinated by the nobility of Crazy Horse, the great Oglala Sioux...
...bottle it can never be put back in. This is rank sentimentalism. The idea that somehow, if people ) have tasted freedom, the taste cannot be wrung out of them is a fallacy so large it is embarrassing just to hear it. Think only of this century. Russia tasted freedom in February 1917 and by October had lost it for 70 years. Weimar Germany tasted democracy for 14 years; it took Hitler and his storm troopers a few months to eradicate it. (Had Hitler not started World War II, the taste might to this day not have returned.) Hungarians...