Word: soviet
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...from Sanandaj that the Interior Minister had worked out a tentative agreement with the Kurds that would grant them some degree of local autonomy. How long the accord would last was uncertain. A proud mountain people whose kinsmen fan out across the border into Iraq, Turkey, Syria and the Soviet Union, the Kurds have been in rebellion against their overlords in Tehran for generations. During the early 1970s, the Shah aided the Kurds, who were fighting a guerrilla war to gain autonomy for their sector of northern Iraq. The U.S. tacitly backed the rebellion, encouraging the Shah to supply...
...reggae songs. After the coup, the music was interrupted by such pleas as "Will the people who kept animals on Mount Royal come back and feed them" and "Will whoever borrowed the keys of the police wagon please return them." Three boatloads of tourists, including a group off a Soviet cruise ship, scarcely noticed that anything was going on, though a few were annoyed that they could not buy stamps at the tightly shuttered post office...
...mental hospital for possessing photocopies of a Milovan Djilas book. In 1965: eight months for protesting the closed trials of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. In 1967: three years in a labor camp for supporting other critics of the system. In 1972: twelve years for telling Western journalists about Soviet psychiatric abuses...
When reality does break through it can be deeply self-abusive and cynical. A Soviet journalist tells Bukovsky that he is happy with Communism because it allows him to earn a good living writing demagogic rubbish. "In a normal country," he says, "they wouldn't let me within a mile of the press! What would I be do ing? Working as a navvy." The most pervasive reality, bureaucratic absurdity, al lows Bukovsky to score even in the last wild moments of his captivity...
...have crossed the Soviet border,' says the KGB agent, 'and it is my duty to inform you officially that you have been expelled from the territory of the U.S.S.R.' 'Do you have some sort of decree or order?' 'No, nothing.' 'And what about my sentence? Has it been quashed?' 'No, it remains in force.' 'So, I'm sort of a prisoner on holiday, on vacation?' 'Sort of.' " "They don't ever know either how to jail or release you properly," concludes Bukovsky...