Word: sorokin
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...Sorokin usually attributes his early rise in Russia's political and educational circles to "mistaken ideas about my ability" and "just plain luck." To ability and chance, his friends would add firm conviction and a tenacity which has brought him both trouble, in the form of political imprisonment, and fame. "This is my stubbornness," he says: "I regard it a man's main duty to tell the truth as he sees...
...early as 1905, Professor Sorokin was telling his truths to factory workers and villagers in his own Russian district. The son of an artisan, he understood the working class, and because of his talents as an orator and pamphleteer, he soon became a top leader in the Social Revolutionary Party...
...political activity that followed were lessons in the technique of the underground. Police methods under the Tsars were comparatively lenient, he discovered, because the dying regime was old and soft. Often prisons became centers of revolutionary activity. But the "super beated Turkish bath" that followed 1917 was another matter. Sorokin had enjoyed a few months respite under the Kerensky government as secretary to the Prime Minister and editor of the party newspaper. When the Bolsheviks stormed the Petrogard Garrison, however, it meant that the other socialist parties would be again outlawed and persecuted...
Looking back at his experiences with the Bolsheviks, Sorokin remembers some lighter incidents, although he was hunted almost continually by the secret police. On one occasion, he was sentenced to Peter and Paul Prison where he found many of the clite from former regimes and parties. These old political enemies, from Tsarists to Anarchists, decided to issue prison society notes, which began "The social season at Peter and Paul resort opened brilliantly today...
...other times, it was harder to laugh. During one summer, Sorokin was forced to hide in the forests of northern Russia. Living off whatever food he could find, he remained there until the first snowfall drove him back to the cities...