Word: vasily
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hand, a small but highly visible minority of residents are enjoying the rich possibilities of upheaval. "Life has never been more exciting in this city!" gushes a street entrepreneur. Others, however, are gripped by a feeling of profound disorientation, even despair. "There is no future here," says Vasili Alexeyev, who shares a single-room apartment with his wife and two sons. "Before, life in Moscow was bad; now it is even worse. We live without hope for tomorrow...
...exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1977, but otherwise nothing like this show has been seen in America before. The very notion of an American museum asking for Stalinist paintings seems so weird that any interest in them is bound to seem morbid. To look at, say, Vasili Svarog's ebullient 1939 painting of Stalin and the jolly butchers of the Politburo frolicking with smiling children in Gorky Park is like hearing a particularly ghastly fairy tale told from the point of view of the ogre...
...understanding of the Russian character must inevitably begin with the land, which covers roughly one-sixth of the globe. Historian Vasili Klyuchevsky speculated that the vast sweep of Russia's steppes and forests induced "a ghastly feeling of imperturbable calm and deep sleep, of loneliness conducive to abstract, sad musing without any clearly defined thought." Russians seem so overwhelmed by the sheer enormousness of their country that they would rather settle down by a warm stove, break out a bottle of vodka and muse about life than go out and plow a furrow toward the endlessly receding horizon. A leading...
...nervous and half apologetic. They gave a preposterous excuse for assuming authority (Gorbachev was too tired and ill to retain command); stressed that the coup was a constitutional devolution of authority to Yanayev, although it clearly was not; and proclaimed a highly dubious devotion to continued reform. Junta member Vasili Starodubtsev sniffled continually, and Yanayev seemed twitchy. As Gorbachev later commented, "They said I was sick, but they were the ones whose hands were shaking...