Word: sasha
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...Arbat sheds light on the dark corner of Soviet history when Stalin ruled his country through fear. The title refers to a circle of young friends who live with their families in a building at 51 Arbat Street, near the center of Moscow. The main character is Sasha Pankratov, a Young Communist League leader at an engineering institute. He is arrested on an obviously false political charge, interrogated by the secret police of the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB) and sentenced to Siberian exile. Some of his friends try to organize a protest petition. A few people sign...
...Sasha Pankratov is me, of course," says Rybakov of the main fictional character. "The parents are my own parents. The relatives and friends are fictional, but they are made up from parts of those I knew in my youth, so they are partly real people too. Every writer writes about his childhood...
...either of her mother's sisters, Aunt Olga and Aunt Pauline, to control. Nothing seems to register with the child, not Olga's antique collecting and social climbing, not Pauline's furious campaigning for black civil rights and social progress. When Pauline discovers Hillela in bed with her son Sasha, the welcome at the last possible adoptive home wears out. Before long, Hillela quits school and is on her own, drifting somewhere in Johannesburg. Eventually she takes up with an antigovernment journalist and then, during the summer of 1963, flees the country with him after the cottage they share...
...right about the girl's underdeveloped intellect, but he does not recognize her ability to learn, as her cousin Sasha will later write her in a letter, "through your skin." Hillela is a blank slate: "For me," she says, "everything happens for the first time." She does not, for instance, think that her people, the whites, are necessarily better than the blacks. Since she is free of such preconceptions, she can travel easily and lightly through Africa, a place where old rules are crumbling or no longer apply...
Lonetree, who is from St. Paul, arrived in Moscow in September 1984, and allegedly started working for the KGB soon after he began a love affair with an embassy translator. She later introduced the Marine to her "Uncle Sasha," an operative known as Aleksei Yefimov. The scandal began to unfold when Lonetree, feeling pressure from the Soviets, surrendered to U.S. authorities in Vienna last December. Bracy, a native of Queens, N.Y., is said to have had a sexual relationship with one of the embassy's Soviet staff, a cook. Both of the women who became involved with the Marines were...