Word: samara
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Compliments and thanks for "Fever Chart" and "Appointment in Samara" in TIME, Oct. 27. They are the tops. Written as though from a mountaintop where we get in one view significance of the past, pathos and confusion of the present, doom in the future unless we wake up with a bang...
There was a terrible famine in 1891, when the rye and wheat crops failed. In a dozen provinces around Samara 30,000,000 peasants shrank on the bone and swelled in the belly. The great U.S. heart was touched. Money was raised, four ships of provisions and clothing sailed for St. Petersburg. But the Volga was far from the Mississippi and the aid came too late: thousands perished...
Between 1921 and last week Samara had been renamed Kuibyshev, after Valerian Vladimirovich Kuibyshev, who was head of the State Planning Commission and prime mover of the First Five-Year Plan when he died in 1935. The city had been refurbished, as the junction of important railroads joining Moscow, the Donets Basin and Siberia, as the location of an armature and carburetor factory famous throughout the U.S.S.R., as a cultural center with seven colleges, 18 technical schools, six scientific research institutes, six repertory theaters...
...Government bureaus and foreign diplomats who had moved to Samara last week settled down to their routine of calls. They waited for the Moscow Ballet, the Bolshoi Theater casts. The U.S. Embassy holed up in a former school. Diplomats gathered at the Grand Hotel for flat beer from the local brewery. With the Germans still 600 miles away in the west, they speculated about the Volga Germans, many of whom had been deported to Siberia. With the Italians still 700 miles away in the southwest, they sat down to huge meals of Samara's abundant local macaroni...
...these foreign visitors must have felt urgency in the city's memories. They must have heard echoes of the piteous, patient cry Walter Duranty heard so often in the Samara of two decades...