Word: sovietize
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Japanese officials will never know just how close Japan Air Lines Flight 441 came to disaster on Oct. 31, when Soviet fighters scrambled as it strayed near restricted airspace over Sakhalin Island. Last week airline officials revealed that the JAL 747, carrying 132 people, took off at 12:14 p.m. from Narita Airport outside Tokyo and headed for Paris by way of Moscow. Shortly before 1 p.m., Captain Morihiko Nishioka, 39, spotted dense clouds ahead. Anticipating turbulence, he switched off the automatic inertial navigational system to guide the jet manually around the mass. Nishioka claims that he then forgot...
...next 55 minutes, the plane was pushed 69 miles off course by 200-knot winds and dangerously close to the Soviet defense zone at Sakhalin. When crew members realized the error, they radioed Soviet controllers, who granted permission for the plane to change course. Only later did Nishioka learn that Soviet jets had been put on airborne alert and had trailed his craft. While the incident ended happily enough, it was a chilling reminder of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, which in September 1983 also strayed near Sakhalin. The Soviets fired on the jet, killing all 269 people on board...
...only similarity between the contestants is that each plays with a red Soviet flag on his side of the table. The darkly handsome Kasparov is a long-distance runner, pop-music buff and sharp dresser who regularly dates a striking blond stage actress, Marina Neolova. But another woman in his life has long been more important. After the death of his Jewish father Kim Wehistein, Kasparov took the maiden name of his Armenian mother Clara; she has ruled his career ever since. At the championships she sat motionless each day in the same third-row seat, watching intensely. Though...
Karpov, on the other hand, is what a Swiss newspaper called Homo sovieticus: a culture hero with close ties to the late leader Leonid Brezhnev, recipient of the Order of Lenin and a strong voice in the inner circle of Soviet chess. Owner of an impressive collection of rare stamps, the chilly and distant Muscovite is a well-known ruble millionaire who is rumored to be a dollar one as well. Although he enjoys rare Soviet amenities like a mobile telephone in his car, Karpov does not ignite the imagination. "Style?" he once puzzled. "I have no style...
...sure, defectors traditionally move west, and no one lately has made a compelling case for the Soviet Union as a Utopia of artistic freedom. But White Nights sails giddily over political realities like the farm animals in a Chagall landscape. When Kolya Rodchenko (Baryshnikov) is "welcomed back" by the KGB, he is put in the custody of Raymond Greenwood (Gregory Hines), a black tap dancer who defected from the U.S. after Viet Nam. Poor Raymond is a neurotic mess; glamorous Kolya has the nimble tread of melancholic star quality. Raymond agonizes about his family back home; Kolya never visits...