Word: siberias
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Seventeen hundred miles south of its Alaskan base, and only 25 miles from Kamchatka, the long tongue of Soviet territory that hangs down from eastern Siberia, a U.S. four-engine B50 bomber sighted two MIG-15s. One of them closed to a cautious 800 yards and opened fire; the B-50's gunners returned a few bursts. The bomber returned to base undamaged...
World War I broke Czarist power, brought about the 1917 short-lived Kerensky government and the Bolshevik coup d'etat. Stalin got out of Siberia, but took small part in these momentous events. U.S. Journalist John Reed did not even mention him in Ten Days That Shook the World. But Stalin, the Inside Man, emerged as one of the seven members of the party's political bureau and was appointed Commissar of Nationalities. Joked Lenin: "No intelligence is needed, that is why we've put Stalin there...
...Bolsheviks came to a head with the assassination of Sergei Kirov, Leningrad Party boss, and one of Stalin's stooges in the Politburo. Stalin went to the scene and took charge. He ordered 117 suspects to be shot without trial; thousands of Leningrad Party members were sent to Siberia. It was the beginning of a huge purge. From 1935 through 1938 successive trials were held of all prominent Bolsheviks who were not Stalin's sycophants, with Andrei Vishinsky prosecuting. They appeared a craven...
When it was all over, perhaps 7,000,000 people had disappeared, either into the GPU mass burial pits or into the vast slave camps of Siberia. But Stalin could rest: he had destroyed many innocent people, but with the good grain he had also burned the chaff of the old Bolshevik Party, the chief challenge to his power. He himself slept well. The new generation of party members, which he set about recruiting and educating, were functionaries, meek & mild bureaucrats, with a mortal fear in their bowels...
...Prokofiev, the son of the manager of a large estate, was no political revolutionary. In 1918 he got himself a passport and took off across Siberia and the Pacific for the U.S. For the next 15 years he was a free-footed citizen of the world-composing operas (his Love for Three Oranges was premiered in Chicago in 1921), ballets (he collaborated with Paris' famed Impresario Serge Diaghilev for 15 years) and piano concertos which he himself triumphantly played on tour. At 40, he ranked with Strauss, Stravinsky and Schoenberg as one of the world's most challenging...