Word: sovietizers
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...delivered from Russia to Harvard, with the rest slated to be installed in Lowell House next summer. The new set is coming to Cambridge in exchange for Harvard’s historic bells from Danilov Monastery in Moscow, which an American industrialist purchased from Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union and gave to the University in 1930. When the bells arrived over 70 years ago, 17 of them went to Lowell House. But one was sent across the Charles River after a bell expert determined that two of them were too close in tone to be sounded...
It’s stunning that, despite its scads of esoterica, Gnosticism, and descriptions of the minutiae of daily life and bureaucracy in Soviet Russia, Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” still manages to be captivating and hilarious, chapter after chapter. The plot begins simply enough. Satan decides to visit Moscow, arrives, and shortly thereafter decapitates one of the first people he meets—a man who, like all dutifully atheistic Soviets, refuses to believe in the Dark Lord’s existence. With a supernatural and motley crew that includes...
After the Bolshevik Revolution, the mansion served as a shelter for the homeless until 1934 when Stalin turned it over to the recently formed Union of Soviet Writers (USW). The Oak Hall became the most coveted, élitist and inexpensive restaurant in the country. Stalin himself visited on occasion, but it was a regular haunt for Lavrenti Beria, his secret police henchman notoriously given to perfidy, cruelty and lust...
...entire history of Soviet literature played out in the Oak Hall, where loyal literary functionaries and dissident writers ate, drank and often fought. It was there that foreign VIPs were brought to rub shoulders with selected members of the intelligentsia. At the height of Gorbachev's perestroika in 1988, U.S. President Ronald Reagan met there with dissident Soviet writers...
...long time ago, when the Soviet Union was beginning to shatter, a Russian friend cracked a joke, and I doubled up laughing on a snowy street in Moscow. "I wish I could smile the way you Americans do," he said. I asked why he couldn't. He said he'd been trained by his parents never to show emotions in public. A stray smile could be misinterpreted, could mean the Gulag. I realized then that my reaction to his joke had been a political statement - a reflexive demonstration of my freedom. I thought about that when the laughter began...