Word: sputniked
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...shepherding through his education-spending plan to the Secretary of Defense, who has had far more luck in sparing his requests from the budgeteer's ax. There is ample precedent for treating education as a national-defense issue. In the panic that followed the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, which vastly expanded federal support for science, math and foreign-language instruction in public schools...
...century' as the deed of ultra-rightists linked to the CIA and carrying out the will of the oil magnates of Texas." Texts on Soviet history tend to celebrate triumph after triumph, from the success of the Revolution to victory in World War II to the launch of Sputnik. They gloss over Stalin's purges, the starvation of millions during the collectivization of farms, military blunders that nearly lost the war to Hitler and corruption in the Brezhnev era. Meanwhile, an elementary primer claims, "The leadership of the party of Communists is working well and is building a new, happy...
Jackson began studying Russian in 1958 as a sophomore at Northwestern University after Sputnik went up. He put the language to good use a decade later as a wire-service reporter in Prague, where he interviewed "bewildered and uncommunicative Soviet soldiers" who helped crush the reformist Prague Spring. That encounter gave Jackson a glimpse of the plight of individuals in a police state, which became a major theme of his 1986 novel, Dzerzhinsky Square. As he left Moscow for Bonn, Jackson looked forward to reporting from "a country that works, a land of good wine and clean rest rooms...
...Provideniya does have its charms. The Eskimos and 54 other day-trippers, each with some $200 worth of rubles, bought out the town's supply of Sputnik toothpaste, Soviet flags and T shirts commemorating the Russian Revolution. The Americans gave Oleg Kulinkin, who functions as mayor, a Xerox copier, the town's first, and a gas generator to power it. As the Alaskans headed toward the gravel runway for their return, the group's tour guide said, "I think you must come back. Soon is better than later...
Such self-assurance on the part of the Soviet space establishment will be in ample evidence this week as IKI and its charismatic director, Roald Sagdeyev, sponsor a three-day extravaganza of seminars and speeches celebrating the 30th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957. Called Space Future Forum, it will focus on the topic of international cooperation in space. Some 500 scientific luminaries from around the world plan to attend...